Impossibility of Knowing

A friend told the author that for years she had observed a particular couple in a cafe every day.  Then one day, the couple stopped coming, and as it turned out the man had been killed.   The story became the seed of a novel  titled  "Los enamoramientos" which has been translated as "the Infatuations". The author Javier Marias, the narrator, for the first time in Marias' novels a woman, the themes, those occupying Marias in all his novels, love, death, loyalty and betrayal, impossibility of knowing, as he says in an interview
"the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure."

I have read all of Marias' recent novels translated into English, and have just ordered A Man of Feeling, which he says is the first work where he developed his digressive style, and I must say that I have not yet read a more fascinating writer of such power, who gets to the core of things, and whose prose hits so very close to home as to become disturbing, sometimes forcing me to step back in the middle of a novel to take a breath and distract myself with some other author's writing, as happened a month or so ago, and again last night when I returned to the third volume of his masterpiece Your Face Tomorrow.


But let's stay with the main theme, which Marias says in an interview published on Youtube, has been a theme of all literature, the impossibility of knowing.   I know.  As I return in memory to things that happened to me in recent times and a long time ago, things like stumbles and failures, but also successes, I cannot honestly say why and how they came to be, I cannot to begin guessing the motivations and reasons of other people involved, and this can be particularly painful when one thinks of the defeats that somehow came my way all too often, or so I tend to think.  No, the truth is that I have been guessing at the others' motivations and I haven't reached any conclusions, just questions that I cannot ask of anyone, theories based on thin evidence, conjectures and fantasies. And why I behaved one way or another might have been clear to me at the time, but was it right, or should I have done something different, and if I had would the result have been different?