At first glance, Javier Marías’ short novella (or long short story) Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico—originally published serially in 1996 in Spain’s El País newspaper—appears little more than a put on, a dashed-off throwback by a Marías who had already reached literary maturity, if not yet the all but uncontested international reverence he enjoys today, to the pastiche of his early, adolescent novels: the absurdist tale of one Ruibérriz de Torres who, from an indeterminately contemporary present, recalls the trip he took to Mexico at the age of twenty-two (just past adolescence himself) to work as Spanish language consultant to Elvis Presley during shooting for the film Fun in Acapulco.

But what seems a mere literary inside joke initially, and perhaps even to the author himself—in the epigraph, Marías dedicates the short novella, or long short story, to “someone who’s laughing in my ear”—reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be a good deal more. Clocking in at fifty-seven rather diminutive pages in its recently released English translation, an elegant gold and white paperback the size of a folded napkin and nearly as slender, Bad Nature performs a virtually Borgesian distillation of, if not the entire literary universe—as is the case in some of the best of Borges’ stories—then at the very least the entirety of Marías’ personal literary universe: the “Yoknapatawpha of the mind,” as Wyatt Mason described it in 2005, that the Spanish novelist has been mapping, in a single voice, over years and across novels.

The novel’s narrator, for starters, reprises a secondary character from Marías’ 1994 Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. In that novel Ruibérriz de Torres, a well-connected opportunist who appears on the scene a couple of times as a means of “swelling the progress” and then perfunctorily withdraws, comes off as something of a scoundrel. Addressing the reader in Bad Nature in the instantly recognizable first person voice in which all of Marías’ mature novels are narrated, however, he becomes a good deal more sympathetic, and not simply because he will turn out to be the victim—a victim, in any event—of one very bad night in Mexico City. Rather, this Ruibérriz de Torres becomes sympathetic above all because, like all of the mature Marías’ narrators, so interchangeable in the moment they begin to narrate that it is difficult not to take them as a sort of collective amanuensis for the author himself, he is someone victimized by his own seemingly irresistible compulsion to tell.

If Marías’ work, as Mason contends, indeed maps a “Yoknapatawpha of the mind” or any other territory for that matter, then this little problem of telling is without doubt its capital city. “One should never tell anyone anything,” begins the typically exegetic opening chapter of Marías’ most recent novel, the three-volume, 1500-page masterwork Your Face Tomorrow, and thus it will be the task of the narrator Jacques Deza, bound as he is by the novelistic prohibition against internal contradiction, to determine just what mysterious force compels him to tell (and tell and tell) despite the dangers. In the case of Bad Nature’s much more youthful Ruibérriz de Torres, by contrast, the dangers of telling are not given in advance but will only be discovered after the fact. What compels him to tell, on the other hand, is perfectly straightforward: it is his job.