Berta Isla

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While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages. With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marias examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves. Their conviction that they are meant to be together is particularly striking in a book that so often asserts our powerlessness over our fate and questions our basis to make judgments about anything. 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.

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. It is a source of continuing regret to me that I’ve never been approached to be a spy – especially since I came of age during the cold war, speak Russian, and went to boarding school and Cambridge.Berta, we realise, is becoming something she feared as a schoolgirl: someone whose story “did not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting someone else’s more eventful and interesting life”.

Upon graduation, because of his great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the British secret service and thus begins his life as an underground agent. Tomás is the prime suspect, unless, that is, he happens to have changed his mind about spying for his adopted country. At the same time, Berta Isla is a subtle reflection on the nature of fiction and the novel’s ability to serve as a tool to explore the many nuances of human nature.

When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson—the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. In fact, reading Berta Isla, I learned rather more about translation and the Spanish use of the subjunctive than I did about the profession of spying. Marías, a celebrated Spanish author, offers up a masterly premise and plot that are worthy of a Hitchcock adaptation, and the denouement does not disappoint. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.