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Thus Bad Begins Hardcover – 25 Feb 2016

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Javier Marías (Author)
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Javier Marías (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 15 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 512 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (25 Feb. 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0241972809
  • ISBN-13: 978-0241972809
  • Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 3.5 x 24 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 240,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

Publisher's description. From one of Spain's most acclaimed literary voices comes a rich and complex portrait of mutual deception, toxic love and cruel, lingering guilt. A youth caught in the middle of someone else's bitter marriage; a beautiful woman scorned; a man torn between conscience and will. Step into the melancholic, unforgiving world of Javier Marías. (Penguin)

About the Author

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He is the author of sixteen works in Spanish, which have been translated into forty-two languages including English. His translated English works are All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, When I Was Mortal, Dark Back of Time, The Man of Feeling, Voyage Along the Horizon, Written Lives, the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Fever and Spear, Dance and Dream, and Poison, Shadow and Farewell), Bad Nature, While the Women Are Sleeping and The Infatuations. Javier Marías has received numerous literary prizes including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Formentor, and he is the King of Redonda. He lives and works as a translator and columnist in Madrid. His most recent novel is Thus Bad Begins.

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsThus Bad Begins and Worse Remains Behind
By Susannah B (Susie B) TOP 100 REVIEWER on 24 Feb. 2016
Format: Paperback
It is 1980 and we are in Madrid, five years after the Franco regime has ended, where we meet Juan de Vere, a young graduate, who begins working as an assistant to film director Eduardo Muriel. Eduardo is married to the rather alluring Beatriz, but it doesn't take long for Juan to realize that their marriage is not a happy one. Staying in the Muriels' apartment one night, Juan overhears a conversation between Eduardo and Beatriz, where Eduardo informs his wife that he will never forgive her for deceiving him: "If only you'd never told me" he tells her "if only you'd kept me in the dark. When you embark on a deception, you should maintain it right until the end." Juan does not learn exactly how Beatriz deceived her husband, however he is intrigued, and he later finds himself following Beatriz when she goes out alone, but in doing so he discovers something that places him in a rather difficult position. His situation is soon made even more uncomfortable when Eduardo asks him to act for him as an agent provocateur - however the target is not Biatriz, but a friend of his, Dr Jorge Van Vechten. Eduardo has heard some very nasty rumours about his doctor friend, who is supposed to have behaved in "an indecent manner towards a woman, or possibly more than one…" and Eduardo wants Juan to befriend Van Vechten with the intention of discovering whether there is any truth behind the rumours. It's not a job that Juan initially relishes, but as he learns more about the doctor he becomes intrigued, not just by Van Vechten's present behaviour, but by his past and his role during and after the Civil War.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsThe spy who came into the fold.
By SueKich TOP 500 REVIEWER on 13 Jun. 2016
Format: Hardcover
Javier Marías doesn’t have characters in his books, he has people. To open a Marías novel is to enter their world, to understand their history - even though, as the author says, "we always arrive late in people's lives". One might say that the plot of a Marías novel is almost irrelevant; for the ‘people-watchers’ amongst us, the relationships are the story. And yet, the plot of this one is so damn good too. Here, the narrator looks back on a formative period of his youth in 1980 when he was 23, a time when Spain was enjoying a period of elective amnesia after the Franco years, a time when divorce was still forbidden.

Juan De Vere works as a personal assistant at the home of a noted film director whose career is now waning. Juan is not quite treated as one of the family, more as an invisible member of the household. ‘Young De Vere’, the director calls him with a degree of affection. Juan admires and respects his boss Eduardo Muriel so greatly that when he is given an unusual – and an unusually tricky – task, he complies without hesitation. It is to us, his readers, that Juan confides his concerns. As well as much else. He seems to have a natural aptitude for spying.

This is the starting point, the barest bones of a story rich in depth, many layered, most finely told and translated. It would be doing any prospective readers a grave disservice to reveal more. Javier Marías writes with such understanding of the human condition that this novel, all five hundred pages of it, was for me a complete joy to read. Just one of many memorable lines: “That’s the trouble with secrets, one can never ask forgiveness.”
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5.0 out of 5 starsThus Bad Begins - Javier Marias
By RachelWalker TOP 500 REVIEWER on 14 Oct. 2016
Format: Hardcover
Nothing can quite describe the pleasure of reading the sinuous, discursive sentences of Javier Marias. He's the greatest foreign language writer there currently is, and Thus Bad Begins is perhaps his best book since A Heart So White. His works are strange, illusory things: packed with incident but also slow, teasing, tantalisingly drawn out. I loved this - startling, unsettling, gripping and very pleasurable. They need concentration and effort, but they reward tenfold.
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5.0 out of 5 starsCover-up is maybe a better option.
By R. Naftalin on 3 April 2016
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
Javier Marias is a gifted and original writer. This novel ostensibly is focused on a bad marriage, the cause of which is resentment of the wife's perceived deception, is perhaps an allegory of the resentments at the tyrannies of the Franco regime. Franco's police state infiltrated the whole fabric of Spanish society and the winners were able to threaten, blackmail, rob and rape with impunity during the entire existence of the regime and beyond the Dictator's death; even though the police-state had been replaced by a democratic constitutional monarchy, still the covert guilt and shame remaining meant that there was no closure. Instead to this day, furtive cover-ups and avoidance of public or private admission that these terrible deeds occurred.
Living in this shadowy world of suspicion, fear, resentment, the only options were exile, or compromise with the regime, with consequent loss of self-respect and loathing for others who had done the same.
So reconciliation and amnesty are not a matter of shaking hands and calling it a day far less forgiveness-neither in public domain nor in the private domain of marriage. Marias seems to suggest that dirty secrets should stay secret, this at least allows people to live without suffering insupportable anguish.
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