Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear v. 1 (New Directions Books) [Paperback]

This translated work has the narrator attending a cocktail party thrown by a tweedy, elderly gentleman Oxford don. After some amusing scenes, their friendship is explored and each narrates long histories regarding the Spanish Civil War, life in England, etc. Then the narrator is asked to take on work of studying people, videos, etc, for his observations.

The vague spymaster tone, with many references to Kim Philby and various leftists in Spain, is one theme of this novel. Another is the narrator's long passages where he makes the kind of brilliantly mundane, but brilliantly subtle, observations about people and life. For example, a scene where the narrator stays at the don's house and late at night, finds and cleans up a small bloddstain at the top of the stairs. The scene, on the surface extremely mundane, goes on and on as the author spins in much wisdoom and asides that are quite captivating. Also, several (many) times there are translations between English and Spanish that the narrator comments quite amusingly on, how a certain phrase or other has a uniqueness that is very unexpected and interesting to consider.

This is also in general a very amusing book, surprisngly. The author knows how to be comic when it's called for, and several characters are purely for comic relief. Also, the narrator's tone always has a witty undertone to it, making the dialogue and comments he makes crackle with appeal.

My only problem is that the printing of this book, the pages, are to small. The text is essentially many unbroken paragraphs, and with a large typeface set onto small-than-average page size, it makes for a daunting visual. Better is to use a larger page, with small typeface, whereby the text can be approached as a whole and sunk into, rather than as a too-bold stream.

Clearly, this is literary fiction of the highest quality, doen superbly and it is amazing to read in its depth and sheer richness.

I am convinced that Javier Marías is one of the world's greatest living authors. "The Dark Back of Time" probably is one of the ten best books I have ever read, and "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" is an exceptional novel, with "A Heart So White" not far behind. So I approached this first volume of Marías's trilogy, presumably his magnum opus, with great anticipation. But having read it, I find that I will have to reserve judgment at least until I read Volumes II and III.

Javier Marías is not an easy author to read, but one does become accustomed to his convoluted sentences and his narrative sprawl and digressions. Still, I don't believe a newcomer to Marías should make YOUR FACE TOMORROW his introduction to Marías's elaborate, almost baroque, style. Further, the plot is thin, tissue-paper thin, much less substantial than in his other novels that I have read. And while there are many wonderful passages of astute observations or profound meditations, there also are passages that I find pointless, seemingly nothing more than Marías showing off (although I recognize that they may take on significance in Volume II or III).

The narrator, ostensibly, is the same Spaniard who narrated "All Souls." There he had the false name "Emilio"; here he is Jaime Deza (or Jacobo or Jacques). He is separated from his wife Luisa and young son, and he is back in Great Britain, specifically Oxford and London. Most of the novel pertains to either of two situations: one, Deza's lengthy conversations with Sir Peter Wheeler, an elderly Oxford professor and ex-MI6 agent, or two, Deza's work "interpreting" people (i.e., assessing or evaluating them) for a group with nebulous connections to British intelligence services.

As is typical of Marías, there are numerous digressions into various and sundry subjects. One of the most prominent such discursive subjects is the Spanish Civil War, and Deza's ruminations often turn to the experiences of his parents and injustices they suffered at the hands of the fascists and their toadies. (Marías's own father was persona non grata with and under Franco, and I suspect - although I don't know this for certain - that much of the family history of the fictional Jaime Deza is the history of the real Javier Marías.)

The blurring of fact and fiction, characteristic of Marías's other work, seems also to be operative in YOUR FACE TOMORROW: VOL. I. Other themes are trust and betrayal (which lends the novel its title in the form of the question "How can I know today your face tomorrow?"), confidences and secrets, human speech versus silence, names and identity, memory and time, the present versus the past, and the absolute terminality of death.

As in most of Marías's other books, the title is taken from Shakespeare, in this instance from "Henry IV, Second Part" (Act II, Scene 2, line 14). Other plays from Shakespeare also are referred or alluded to. In addition, Marías makes very effective use of the dying words of Cervantes ("Farewell, wit; farewell, charm . . .") and a haunting quote from Rilke's First "Duino Elegy" (beginning "It is strange to inhabit the earth no longer").

But Marías is not simply a literary recycler. He is himself a complex and original thinker and a distinguished craftsman of language (albeit vicariously transmitted to us in what surely is a magnificent translation from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa). YOUR FACE TOMORROW, VOL. I is studded with notable passages. I will offer one, which I hope will convey some sense of Marías's style. It is part of a brilliant critique of the modern political fad of reparations:

"Who do our representatives and our governments think they are, asking forgiveness in the name of those who were free to do what they did and who are now dead? What right have they to make amends for them, to contradict the dead? * * * A person is a person and does not continue to exist through his remote descendants, not even his immediate ones, who often prove unfaithful; and these transactions and gestures do nothing for those who suffered, for those who really were persecuted and tortured, enslaved and murdered in their one, real life; they are lost for ever in the night of time and in the night of infamy, which is doubtless no less long. To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are not formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads, of their pierced breasts, or their broken bones and slit throats."

Like W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías is fascinated with the past. How can we know the past? How can we memorialize it? How can we even begin to tell it without distorting or destroying it? As for the present, "It's a curse, * * * it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing."

This book is the first part of a trilogy which has just been completed. I came across the author because of a truly wonderful story about his fear of flying in the summer 2009 issue of Granta. More recently, The Economist highly recommended the (third volume of the) trilogy, acknowledging that readers have to cope with several problems.
This first part is a personal and a family history, and a history of the Spanish civil war, by a man endowed with a unique talent. He is able-on the basis of brief encounters (interviews, sometimes observations with only a few words exchanged)- to assess persons, know them better than they know themselves and put his findings on paper, in report form. It is a very rare gift and his talent is turned into employment by a shady agency in London, after his marriage in Madrid breaks up. The agency and the history of his sponsors suggest he is hired to play a role in support of post-Cold War intelligence work. After all, he lived in the UK before he married, lecturing in Oxford, building a network of friends. Interesting!
However, Jaime Marias(JM) is his own writer, full of ideas and ambitions beyond a simple spy novel. The way the novel is written has led one Amazon.uk reviewer to give up reading well before reaching the half-way point. Why? Most pages are solid blocks of text, indentations are few, white lines absent. Fortunately, the chapters are fairly short. Real dialogues are rare. Usually, one character answers a question and holds forth for pages on end. It is sometimes interrupted by page-long musings by the hero himself, and then the lecturing continues. Is it a book written for women rather than men?
But it is also on occasion a warm, passionate book because of the personal ingredients. His description of the emotions at work during a break-up are unsurpassed: the fury, the incomprehension, the doomed efforts to win back a loved one, the autism received. Same for definitions and examples of betrayal in general. The description of the hero's frenzied midnight search in his mentor's library for details about the Spanish civil war is superb.
After finishing this book, I was in need of something else. But I will read Part Two of JM's trilogy, because he has really made me curious about what happened before and happens next.