Javier Marias is die romansier wat ek op die oomblik die meeste bewonder en die graagste lees — veral sedert ek sy driedelige meesterstuk (en mees onlangse werk) Your Face Tomorrow gelees het. Laat gisteraand en vroeg vanoggend het ek ook uiteidelik A Heart So White klaar gelees. Nogeens ‘n meesterlike werk. Marias is die Proust van ons tyd. Hier is vir jou ‘n kort uittreksel om as voorsmakie te dien van Marias se fluisterende, nadenkende stem:
“Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, that everything happened and at the same time didn’t, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences gradually cancels itself out, negates itself in its apparent repetitiveness until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. There is no such thing as a whole or perhaps there never was anything. But it’s also true that there is a time for everything and that it’s all there, waiting for us to call it back…” (p. 272)
