Javier Marías

Javier Marías never could hold his tongue, said Giles Harvey in The New York Times Magazine. The 67-yearold Spanish novelist, who enjoys, across Europe, “a kind of cultural prestige that makes even America’s most successful literary writers look like obscure hobbyists,” began speaking out in his 20s against apologists for Spain’s 36-year fling with fascism. In 1999, when Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela tried to brush off queries about his fascist past, Marías drew fire for pressing the case.

But today, as a new generation pushes for an overdue reckoning with the misdeeds of dictator Francisco Franco and his enablers, Marías can’t simply applaud the effort. He has dismissed as “a fairy tale” the idea that Spain has “the people” to thank for establishing democracy after Franco’s 1975 death. “In reality,” he wrote in his weekly newspaper column, “the people, with some exceptions, were devoted to the dictatorship and cheered it on.”

In Marías’ latest novel, Berta Isla, about the wife of a spy, the title character at one point unloads on “the people,” calling them as stupid and untouchable as the despots of the past. “They have the prerogative to be as fickle as they please,” she says, “and they don’t have to answer for how they vote.” Like many Marías novels, this one wrestles with how past horrors are best addressed, giving final word to a character who argues against fetishizing them. “Some things are so evil that it’s enough that they simply happened; they don’t need to be given a second existence by being retold,” Marías says. “That’s what I think on some days, anyway. Other days I think the contrary.”