Thus Bad Begins

Description

A darkly smouldering tale of a young man entangled in his employer's unhappy marriage As a young man, Juan de Vere takes a job that will haunt him for the rest of his life. His employer is sophisticated film mogul Eduardo Muriel. Through him Juan meets Muriel's wife, Beatriz, a highly sensual woman utterly neglected by her husband. And then there's Dr Jorge Van Vechten, an old family friend with a shadowy past. But what role will Juan play in this unhappy home? What connects Beatriz and Van Vechten? And what happened in the chaotic years after the war? As Juan learns more about his employers, his own innocence quickly falls away. He starts out as a mere observer but soon finds himself unable to stand on the side lines, compelled to interfere ever more dangerously in the dark interior of other people's lives.

Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951 and died in 2022. He published fifteen novels, three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. 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. He was also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

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 Marias. * Penguin * Marias returns with another masterful tapestry of noir-ish twists and digressive cerebration * The Millions * Elegant and beautiful, reminiscent of Proust... Magnificent * Daily Mail * One of Marias's most enjoyable and accessible novels * Financial Times * Marias is relentless in his pursuit of literary and psychological truth * Sunday Times * Ferociously addictive, troubling seductive... It works as high literary fiction, constantly picking apart our assumptions about story and fiction, but also offering good old-fashioned plot' * Independent * A powerful study of history and memory from a literary giant * Sunday Times * Easily as engrossing as anything he's written before... He manages to tread the tightrope between a very literary fiction and an utterly absorbing plot * The Times * Alfred Hitchcock would be a home with Marias - but so too might Harold Pinter...It's a rare trick to pull off, this combination of suspense, analysis and metaphysics that aims both high at the brow and low at the gut * Prospect * Almodovar-esque * New York Magazine * On the page, he is expansive and unrestrained * New Yorker * A major work from a global talent, Thus Bad Begins knits Hitchcockian suspense into a hypnotic tale crackling with erotic tension and political strife... The personal is political, as Marias' powerful, wide-ranging, yet curiously intimate novel attests * Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Marias is a master of a kind of suspense that is rare in the modern novel * NY Times * Erudite, strange, hypnotic and beautiful...One reads Marias for his ability to make the smallest parts of the world come alive * LA Times *