it was a long time ago when you read marias, you have odd memories related to this, you read three earlier books, they were recommendations, a heart so white, the oxford one all souls, and tomorrow in the battle think of me. then you forgot about it. what you did remember is the relative force of them, plot long forgotten, but you remember he could sustain a line of thought for a long time, and you think that this is one of his strength, a line of thought, related to one or other of the eternal problems troubling humanity and going with it, clothing it in a good amount of complexity, not incomprehensibly, but say, above average complexity expressed in excellent long sentences (not too long, but longer than average). it was in a way like schubert, just having a tune and running with it, yet schubert - infinitely better. in schubert, it's nature. more melodious. there it is, a line of thought isn't a tune. or perhaps it is. in any event it lead to the impression of sometimes quite forceful insights into the nature of the human condition, you could understand why his books were popular.
you thought popular with a certain type of readership think middleaged men who would read, say nabokov or thomas hardy but not proust or kant. who would stop at marias and not venture further. due to the relative comfort those novels provided, they wouldn't step beyond. the world these characters inhibited, how the expressed themselves. upper middle class no cash problems. these people have problems too, fears anxieties. yes. how do these things get expressed. it's all been cushioned in yes we are troubled but then it never got too far. until it did and the wide field of imponderabilia in writing and human nature would break open and then what.
there you were thinking that marias of old was interesting enough to look at is latest, berta isla and it left you stone cold. you thought it was so boring and so detached, it was like an exercise. there's still some of the power of the sustained line of thought, but there's also lots of boring discussion of politics. you realize how that sounds. berta isla, wife of secret agent. they discuss politics and he always corrects her. it's not as simple as that tho, she's been done some justice. marias lets her ask the right question, and yet. it's such a boring book. it's in a way some kind of meta-boring, because on the surface it addresses all kinds of stuff, just never really touching the core. perhaps it's an exercise in superficiality and as such it is brilliant. and then one would have to think about what that would mean, a book of the surface, is it to say that nothing ever can be said and all is a futile game... perhaps... and if this is the case this would entail a grave insight, of there being an entirely different aspect of existence, of writing, untouched. and in order to understand better what this means, perhaps this one of his insights applies....
'you would need to have lost an awful lot before you'd be willing to renounce what you have'