SHORT REPORT: VOYAGE ALONG THE HORIZON

“This effectively dissuaded Arledge from trying to cultivate a friendship or even a conversation with Bayham; for that, he would have either had to learn very boring rudiments of card games or make idle chitchat with two people to whom he had never been introduced, thanks to Handl's illness as well as the notion—held by all the passengers except for the one who actually thought about such things—that all the people on the boat were already somehow intimately acquainted with one another.”
—page 44, Voyage Along the Horizon by Javier Marías

I am halfway through Voyage Along the Horizon, originally published in Spanish in 1972, and reissued in English in 2006. I find the book fascinating for many reasons.

First, it is a novel about a novel that is being read to someone. Within the novel being read there have been some additional writings that further distance me, the reader, from the characters, and, possibly, the truth. (The truth I am "closest" to may not necessarily be entirely reliable either.)

Second, there are elaborate, potentially unwieldy sentences, like the one quoted above, that actually dance upon the tongue or the mind as they are read. And, some of the sentences really do beg to be read out loud.

Third, for a story that is ostensibly about a book being read by one person to another, after meeting at a dinner party—and, the plot of the book being read mostly happens on a rather boring voyage by ship along the Mediterranean coastline en route to Antarctica—there is a lot of tension and strange goings-on. There is the unexplained disappearance of the boatswain, whose body turns up later. There is the unexplained behavior of Kerrigan, first officer of the ship, who is obsessed with Manchurian ponies aboard the ship. There is a duel, where we do not see the action that results in dire consequences for one passenger. There is the quirkiness and obsession of the main character, Victor Arledge, who is the purported author of the book being read, even though he is written about in third person in the book. These oddities of event and personality keep the narrative moving forward. These moments of the absurd and unexpected burst forth from the rather stilted conventions, manners, and language of the characters, showing us the roiling “id” beneath the “superego” of their social milieu.

Fourth, the language, even in translation, is rich and full and magic. I can only imagine what it reads like in the original Spanish.

At this point, the book is very intriguing, keeping me reading, as I desire to know more, as I want to comprehend what secrets drive these characters.