On Javier Marías’s “Tomás Nevinson”

TOMÁS NEVINSON came in from the cold in Berta Isla (2017; English trans. 2018), the late Javier Marías’s previous novel, to which his newest, Tomás Nevinson (2021; English trans. 2023), is a pendant. (You can read this one independently: the major spoiler in this novel is already given by its title, since Berta—a kind of Penelope—doesn’t find out that Tomás, her husband, is still alive until most of the way through the story in the book named after her.) Now, in 1997, Tomás has been asked by Bertie Tupra—the George Smiley figure in many of Marías’s novels—to undertake another mission “in defence of the Realm” (as he repeats several times): to find a woman who played a major role in two horrific terrorist attacks, real ones, launched by Basque separatists 10 years earlier.