A man visits a married woman in her flat for a tryst while her husband is abroad. Before anything can happen between them, she suddenly falls ill and dies in his arms. He leaves food on the table for her young son sleeping in the next room, takes the incriminating tape out of the answering machine, and, after trying to contact her husband unsuccessfully, flees the flat. At this point he could just let it be, because no one except the dead woman knows who he is and the son is too young to identify him, but he can’t, because guilt is a powerful thing that can drive one to do mad things.
At its heart, the theme of the book is twofold. On one hand, it’s about trying to deal with a horrible event and wanting to absolve oneself of any wrongdoing or responsibility, while striving for the truth but not being confident in one’s ability to bear it, for instance, whether he could have done something to save the woman, or whether the son was alright after he left him. Later on, there is a flashback where he tries to find out something about his ex-wife that is in a similar mold. On the other hand, it’s also about secrets, about having knowledge that others desire or should know, and how that can weigh someone down so heavily that it ultimately creates an absolute need to share in order to ease the burden.
The protagonist himself is not an inherently likeable person; he is a bit sleazy and a bit shady but not irredeemably so, he does not have great relationships with women because he tends to be careless, and he keeps some questionable company, but mostly, he tries to do the right thing. I would call him quite average, as he has good and bad traits like most people do and nothing that seems too extreme in either direction. Since Marías uses stream of consciousness, we dive deep into his psyche and get to know him intimately, and I felt that his actions and decision-making processes were understandable, even when I disagreed with them. Marías’ writing style in general takes some getting used to, because his sentences are often incredibly long and rambling, but exactly because of this seemingly unwieldy technique he manages to pull the reader so deeply into the workings of his protagonist’s mind, that it’s like an inescapable maelstrom. Only very rarely did I think that he went overboard and it became too verbose.
The overall mood of the book is somber, as is fitting for the subject matter, but there is some humour sprinkled in, like an audience with the king that is quite absurdly comedic or a supporting character who is intrinsically funny because of the impression he makes on people. An absolute highlight of the book is the ending; what happens there is immensely surprising, shocking even, but it underlines the theme of the story in an ideal way one more time. There’s really nothing more left to say, except that, to me, this book is brilliant and riveting and basically perfect.