About this item
The story didnt happen that long ago, yet today it would be impossible. Im talking about what happened to them, to Eduardo Muriel and his wife, Beatriz Noguera, when they were young, and not about what happened to me with them, when I was the youth and their marriage a long and unbreakable misfortune. This is the beginning of Thus Bad Begins, a story of intimate life, like those that arent usually told or are only told in whispers, recalled by one who witnessed it in his youth, Juan de Vere, while working for a former successful movie director. That job allowed him to see the strange, unbalanced state of Muriels marriage, as well as its mysterious past. In the excited Madrid of 1980, Muriel asks young De Vere to investigate an old friend of his, Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, whose indecent behavior in the past has caused rumors.
About the Author
Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.
