Berta Isla by Javier Marías

Paolo Maurensig Theory of Shadows Trans. Anne Milano Appel. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 179 pages Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows uses the game of chess as a vehicle to meditate on the Holocaust. Its central character is the infamous Alexandrovich Alekhine, a grand master who collaborated with the Nazis. This novel of ideas opens in spring 1946, with Alekhine living at the Hotel do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, just as the Nuremberg trials in Germany have issued their first warrants. In his tense and factbased mystery, Maurensig returns to his fascination with the relationship between chess and war he first explored in his celebrated The Luneberg Variation (1997). In his framing prologue and epilogue , the author recounts his obsessive investigation of Alekhine’s death in April 1946. Traveling to Estoril to reconstruct Alekhine’s final days, Maurensig writes, “I like to think I am retracing his footsteps.” A waiter at the Hotel do Parque during the war claims there is an official version that leaves many questions still unanswered. No one even knows for certain where Alekhine is buried. By presenting the story from Alekhine’s point of view, Maurensig allows readers to discover the many layers of his self-deception , including that chess is not political: “My adversary was on the chessboard, not in life.” He thinks his art exempts him from moral judgment. Only when he feels endangered does he confront his evasions, his impostures. He ignores the persecution of the Jews and does nothing to stop the violence. He attacks Jewish players in print and does not protect Jewish grand masters when he has the chance. Photographs of him with Josef Goebbels and Hans Frank surface. His dreams contain evil portents; he imagines interrogations. One night, in the middle of dinner, a stranger stares at him, drawing her index finger across her throat. In the brilliant darkness of his story, Maurensig investigates the cost of complicity with evil. Elizabeth Fifer Center Valley, Pennsylvania Javier Marías Berta Isla Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 552 pages. In his latest novel, Berta Isla, Spanish writer Javier Marías delivers an intense, emotionally charged story based on what, at first sight, could be labeled as a story of love and espionage. Set between Madrid and London, the novel tells the story of Berta, a Spanish woman who for twenty-one years (more precisely, between 1969 and 1990) awaits the return home of Tomás (or Tom) Nevinson, her Spanish-British husband. Both characters first fall in love as youngsters while in high school, but once they are Nota Bene Tehmina Khan Things She Could Never Have Mawenzi House Through her short stories, Khan takes us into the complexities of the lives of modern Pakistanis, writing through lenses of class, race, gender, and sexuality . Charmingly modern language surrounds readers, soaking them in the culture of her world while demonstrating the subtleties of an oftenmisrepresented Muslim society. Maria Laina Rose Fear Trans. Sarah McCann World Poetry Books Rose Fear is the first English collection from Greek poet Maria Laina, elegantly captured here in a dual translation that carries us through enchanting yet unsettling sections on “Time,” “Witches,” and “Travel.” Like a grim fairytale, Laina’s silvery lullaby lyricism morphs into beautifully dark chants and hanging, haikulike scenes as it moves between voices and scraps of stories, complicating and recoloring the feeling of fear itself. WORLDLIT.ORG 73 married, Tomás’s schooling will take him to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign languages. A stellar student, whose learning of Spanish and English began naturally at home in Madrid, Tomás soon becomes an admired polyglot by his professors at Oxford. Upon graduation, because of his great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the British secret service and thus begins his life as an underground agent. As is the case with many of Marías’s protagonists, Tomás, or Tom, is an individual of many identities. Truly multicultural and multilingual, he can claim more than one place of belonging while also being perfectly capable of feeling at ease in more than one cultural setting. Such a trait proves to be useful for

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