Berta Isla

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With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marías examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves. His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas.

George Smiley is perhaps a better model for the twilight realm in which Marías’s characters live … This is an enthralling work … Powerful and indelible. A brooding tale of lives darkened by separation and deception … As usual, Marías propels his philosophical debates with the urgency of a thriller, including a bravura plot twist … Skilled and provocative, as always. Marías’s intense, sentimentally charged narrative seems to underscore that only the art of the novel is capable of making visible facets of the human condition that seem invisible to the common eye.While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages.

Deceit and arbitrary power are the dynamos of this dense, compelling novel by one of Europe’s most admired authors … Time reading and thinking about it will be well-spent. Marías, who’s long had a reputation as your favorite author’s favorite author, has lately earned himself a growing readership in the States, and Berta Isla is certainly likely to help the cause. Alone in the park with their baby son, she’s buttonholed by a pair of Irish diplomats – so they say – who claim Tomás is an MI6 agent “invading” their country, as one of them spills lighter fluid on the baby’s pram, ready to spark up. With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple’s fate. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.His] stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history … Berta Isla has many of the master’s signature preoccupations … The elegant translation is alive to every nuance … Berta, the desolate wife, is the heart of the story; her first-person narrative eloquently occupies the bulk of the novel … A complex, emotionally torn character, she evolves and matures, and her intimate story carries the book.