Your Face Tomorrow – Fever and Spear V 1 (New Directions Books)

Product Information

Jetzt sucht Marías seine Souveränität darin, daß er fast ganz auf Handlung verzichtet. Mit der Konsequenz, daß die Gedanken nun oft wie private Versponnenheiten wirken, weil ihnen die Anschauung und Exemplifizierung fehlen. (...) Aber aufs Ganze gesehen wird die Lektüre zur Enttäuschung, nachdem man bis zur Mitte des Buches mit großen, aber aufgeschobenen Erwartungen weitergelesen hat." - Wolfgang Schneider, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

A cliffhanger ending -- an unidentified woman comes to visit Deza in the middle of the night --- also leaves the reader even more curious as to: what next ?) Dadas las furtivas actividades del grupo sin nombre, temas tan centrales en la obra de Marías como el secreto y la traición, lo que se dice y lo que se calla, tienen incluso más protagonismo que en otros libros del autor. Hablar o callar; nadie parece ser capaz de callar hoy en día; y lo que se cuenta no solo es tan importante como lo que realmente sucede —puede que incluso deje una huella más profunda—, además es indefectiblemente impreciso e incluso falso. Además, nadie es capaz de no escuchar, menos aún de olvidar lo escuchado cuando nos damos cuenta de que preferiríamos no haberlo oído nunca porque “todo tiene su tiempo para ser creído.” Las palabras, un flujo inagotable de ellas, mueven la maquinaria del mundo. Hoy se detesta la certidumbre: eso empezó como moda, quedaba bien ir contra ellas, los simples las metieron en el mismo saco que a los dogmas y las doctrinas, los muy ramplones (y hubo entre ellos intelectuales), como si todo fueran sinónimos.Dense, acrobatic stream-of-consciousness exploring the political and personal ramifications of the violation of a confidence, by Spanish novelist Marias ( The Man of Feeling, 2003, etc.). So, again or independently, this dilemma begs the question: what is the function of the first book or part? Javier Marias'ın ustalık eseri denilen seriyi yazarla tanışma kitabı olarak seçmediğim için mutluyum çünkü yarım bırakabilirdim. Yazarın üslubuna alışkın olmak önemli. Kesinlikle sabır isteyen bir metin, yazarın okuduğum tüm kitapları öyleydi gerçi.

This first section of the novel, though marked only by an unnumbered quasi-chapter break, seemed to be preoccupied by experiments in sentence craft. So yeah, I suppose that if you write an actionless, multi-volume novel with a vulgarly high comma-to-period ratio and no actual events save a party and stuffy rich erudite people yakking, you must be consciously placing yourself in a specific European literary tradition, and inviting certain comparisons to some celebrated, endless plotlessness that has come before. So yes, to answer the question blazing in everyone's mind: if Marcel Proust were Spanish and writing a twenty-first-century spy novel, I suppose it might be at least vaguely like this. En Todas las almas se narraban los años que Deza pasó —como el propio Marías— dando clases en Oxford, sumergido en su atmosfera irreal y sus anacrónicos rituales, rodeado de extraños personajes —extravagantes catedráticos, escritores olvidados, antiguos espías. Su etapa oxoniense llegó a su fin y Deza regresó a España, se casó con Luisa y tuvo dos hijos. Pero las cosas no han ido como esperaba y, tras separarse de su mujer, ha vuelto Londres, donde pasa sus días entre un monótono trabajo en la BBC, su solitario apartamento de soltero y las visitas a su buen amigo y mentor Peter Wheeler.The most prominent other figure in the novel is Sir Peter Wheeler, a mentor of sorts to Deza, an Oxford Hispanist.

It’s all in the voice, and if its peculiar intellectual negligees don’t draw you deeper into Marias’ cranial boudoir (for rather traditional pleasures after all is said and done), then you’re left out in the cold, a cold many readers would probably rather be in anyway, and that’s understandable. It’s all in the voice, and its saturating verbal power is reminiscent of Sebald, like an endless stream of voice straight into your ear, or in your face. And as with Sebald this voice is so seemingly natural and so personalized that fiction has the illusion (or is it?) of blending into nonfiction. But unlike Sebald Marias is a game player, a bit of a prankster, though that quality of his is at the service of an urgency in this book, the pranksterism manifesting in a rarefied detachment within some self-absorbed inner cosmos and an insistence on exhausting every topic raised, almost every seed of every idea planted in every statement, like the author had given himself a challenge; it’s almost Oulipian!

This is part 1 of his 3 volume Your Face Tomorrow – not a trilogy, mind you, but a single novel published in 3 parts. The voice throughout is the same, and in the novel the person behind the voice is recruited to serve in a peripheral way in British Intelligence, in league with spies and other covert operators. He is recruited because of his almost preternatural abilities of observation, in his skills of minutely observing people’s behaviors and determining what their inner intentions are, whether they’re lying, and what they’re hiding. So it bears some resemblance to a conventional spy yarn of international intrigue, but instead of focusing on the outer developments of a labyrinthine plot he goes inward to explore the nature of deceptions (both intentional and not) and the ways in which language, voice, is an accomplice (both intentionally and not) in these deceptions. There’s much more going on, such as investigations of personal relationships and the identities within these relationships, and how these deceptions and relationships play out in the larger arenas of societies at war with others and themselves, and within time as it unfolds, often negating itself in its own unfolding; but just with this little taste you should see that there are meta-hijinks at play, but serious hijinks. Cok ilginc bir kitap. Kabaca, gelismis gozlem yetenegine sahip bir adamin gizli istihbarattaki deneyimlerini anlatiyor. Ama konu kitabin cok az bir kismini olusturuyor gibi. Tarihi olaylar hakkindaki yorumlar, kisiler hakkindaki gozlemler ilk sayfadan son sayfaya kadar cok yogun. Bu kadar cok sübjektif paragrafin toplandigi baska bir kurgu okudugumu hatirlamiyorum. Kitap boyunca konu tam olarak neydi hissinden kurtulamiyorsunuz, Deza ve Wheeler'in kimi nasil yargiladigina cok genis yer verilmis. Bir gazetecinin deneme kitabi olacakken kurgu olmus gibi.

The book also suffers from the Spanish literary conceit that ageing academics and writers are irresistible to young women, and generally its female characters are rare, and clichéd and its male figures snobbish. Ve benim de şaşırma sebebim tam da bu yokluk. Sadece uzun gözlemler – anlık çıkarımlar – söz sanatları ve karakterin gözleri olabilmek yetiyor bu eseri sevebilmek için. İlk sayfadan son sayfaya dek bir örgütün farkında oluyorsunuz, merakla bekliyorsunuz. Bu merak sizi sarıp sarmalıyor. Marias okurunu avucunun içine alıyor..

Need Help?

I should say that it took me a while to succumb to its charms. There isn't much of the instantly gratifying, high-gloss surface detail by which novels in the more empirical Anglo-American tradition ingratiate themselves with their readers. Nor is there much attempt to differentiate characters in terms of how they speak or think (odd, perhaps, in a book that consists largely of people talking or thinking out loud). And the ratio of action to abstract speculation feels rather low at times, especially in the first volume, where the ruminative passages often seem to expand more by repetition and tautology than the actual development of a thought. But as the work proceeds and the wonderfully macabre dramas begin to fill out the large intellectual frameworks, and all the recurring motifs – the mysterious drop of blood Deza finds at the top of a staircase, for example, or the notion he calls "narrative horror" whereby a famous life such as JFK's or Jayne Mansfield's is overshadowed by an infamous death – begin to release their implications, so one becomes increasingly aware of the book's immense boldness and originality. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. This novel is all diversion. Marías circles his subject not so much like a shark narrowing in on its prey as one hoping to conjure it out of thin water, and it is to the credit of the book that a fish, of some kind, seems to appear by the end." - Benjamin Markovits, Sunday Telegraph