Click 
It’s been a couple of years since I started reading this trilogy. Though I enjoyed every bit of it, for whatever reason — no, I know the reason: the third volume is huge! — I put off reading the end. The unfortunate result is that I have also been putting off reading other books by Marías that I have been looking forward to. I just couldn’t bring myself to read them when I hadn’t finished this massive work. But now I have, and I can move on, though my suspicion is that someday I’ll return here again. These are impressive books that, no matter how intimidating they may seem and no matter how dense and circular, are surprisingly quick reads.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
This is how this trilogy begins: “One should never tell anyone anything.” Over 1,000 pages later, it ends with Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Tu rostro mañana, 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós , 2007; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, 2010). Obviously, there’s a lot this narrator has to say, and he has many many different ways to say it. This final volume is a wonderful culmination of the themes of language and power (my review of volume one here; of volume two here).
This review will not reveal any significant spoilers about this book or the prior ones, but I do want to bring up one of the central events in book two, Dance and Dream. In that book, Jaime Deza, our narrator, spends a substantial amount of time telling us, from every angle imaginable, about the night he and his boss were entertaining a foreign dignitary and his wife at a dance club. Deza and Tupra, remember, are employees of a secret agency that has as its inception the great wars of the twentieth century. It may have even once been an official government agency, but it is now private; Tupra doesn’t really know who sits at the top of the agency, yet he uses his incredible skills of deduction and induction to interpret people — people like foreign businessmen or politicians — for their clients.
As the night progressed at the dance club, a cocky man dances a bit too, uhm, harshly with the foreign dignitary’s wife. The man is a creep with a ponytail, and Deza doesn’t hesitate when Tupra tells him to get the man into the handicapped bathroom. When they three of them get to the bathroom, Deza is surprised and disgusted when Tupra wields a sword and threatens to decapitate the man. For dozens of pages Deza narrates the frightening moment when it looks like Tupra is going to kill the man (it doesn’t — or didn’t to me — get boring). As it turns out, Tupra doesn’t kill the man, though they leave the man badly injured. Deza leaves the club disgusted and tells his boss as much. This third volume picks up about there. Tupra tells Deza to come to his home; he wants to show him something and defend himself:
You criticize me for some trifling, unimportant thing that I did, but you live in a tiny world that barely exists, sheltered from the violence that has always been the norm and still is in most parts of the world, it’s like mistaking the interlude for the whole performance, you haven’t a clue, you people who never step outside of your own time or travel beyond countries like ours in which, up until the day before yesterday, violence also ruled. What I did was nothing. The lesser of two evils. And it was your fault.
What Tupra shows Deza leaves him even more shocked than the episode at the night club. I suppose it would be possible to criticize this angle in the book as something a bit trite or moralizing, but it doesn’t come off that way. We may get a glimpse at the horrors otherwise decent people do to maintain their power, but this books really delves into the different ways someone can manipulate others — or himself — with language. For example, here is how Deza responds after he sees what Tupra has to show him:
[. . .] the images slipped inside me like a foreign body that caused me immediate pain and a sense of oppression and suffocation and the urgent need for someone to remove it (‘Let me sit heavy on thy soul’), but you cannot root out what enters through the eyes, nor what enters through the ears, it installs itself inside you and there’s nothing to be done about it, or else you have to wait some time in order to be able to persuade yourself that you did not see or hear what you did see or hear — there’s always a doubt or the trace of a doubt — that it was the imagination or a misunderstanding or a mirage or a hallucination or a malicious misinterpretation [. . . ]
Deza has never been entirely comfortable with this job. Really, he took it because two of the people he most respects in the world, Toby Rylands and Peter Wheeler, were a part of it their whole lives; in fact, for all Deza knows, Rylands and Wheeler started the whole thing. Still, these revelations with Tupra lead Deza to repulsion. When he really starts looking into the evil the program is trying to grapple with, it is a poison entering into him.
To me, all of this was fascinating, but then Marías takes the book to an entirely different level. In my prior reviews of this trilogy I mentioned the fact that some of my favorite passages dealt with Deza’s estranged wife. She is hardly a character in the first two volumes, though her impact on Deza is felt all over the place. This is her volume, and all of the themes come together in a very personal way as Deza struggles to fight what he now knows he’s capable of while he saves her from an abusive relationship that she may, in fact, be welcoming. I loved it.
There is concern that New Directions is perceived as an “eat your vegetables” publisher. You might not enjoy them, but the books are healthful and good for you in the long run, even if they don’t exactly hit that spot that just craves giddy satisfaction. This is wrong: New Directions books can satisfy the most self-indulgent pleasure. For one thing, the funniest book I read last year was the wild The Literary Conference, by César Aira, and I was thoroughly charmed by Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl. Okay, okay, so doubters are going to say, “Come on! One’s called The Literary Conference! I want excitement and intrigue and you’re telling me to read a book entitled The Literary Conference? And I don’t even know who this Lichtenburg is, but . . . really? You’re telling me to read these?” To which I respond, “Yes, I am. And I also recommend An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.” And now I’ve just read another New Directions book that belies any claim that New Directions books should be reserved for a more sober time in life. It’s another of their great Pearl Series, and it’s title shouldn’t stand in the way: Javier Marías’s Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico (Mala Indole, 1996 ; tr. from the Spanish by Esther Allen, 1999).
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
I was putting off reading this book because I have yet to tackle the third volume of Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy. I have a stack of his books at home, unread because I feel I should finish what I’ve started first. Why haven’t I read the third book of a trilogy I highly recommend? Because it’s a big book, and I do most of my reading on a train. I still haven’t figured out how to pack it around with me. I’m sure, though, that once I begin it I won’t be sorry. Just as I wasn’t sorry when I finally opened up this Pearl due to its placement on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.
It was delightful to read the first lines and find myself back in Marías territory. An as yet unnamed narrator jumps into the action head first. How? By iterating and reiterating around a slightly abstract concept. In this case, wrath and fear of revenge.
No one knows what it is to be hunted down without having lived it, and unless the chase was active and constant, carried out with deliberation, determination, dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but look for you, keep after you, follow your trail, locate you, catch up with you and then, at best, wait for the moment to settle the score.
. . . vengeance is extremely wearying and hatred tends to evaporate, it’s a fragile, ephemeral feeling, impermanent, fleeting, so difficult to maintain that it quickly gives way to rancor or resentment which are much more bearable, easier to retrieve, much less virulent and somehow less pressing, while hatred is always in a tearing hurry, always urgent.
Before we get even a sense of who’s speaking or why, Marías gives us around 5 pages of this delightful meandering. Of course, we may not know who is speaking or why, but all the time we’re getting a nice look at this speaker’s mind. For some time he has been running from someone whose sole purpose — he thinks — is to avenge some foul deed. From the title we know that this deed probably took place in Mexico . . . with Elvis. Soon, our suspicion is confirmed.
It all happened because of Mr. Presley, and that is not one of those idiotic lines referring to the record that was playing on the night we met, or to the time we were careless and went too far, or to the idol of the person who caused the problem by forcing us to go to a concert to seduce her or just to make her happy. It all happened because of Elvis Presley in person, or Mr. Presley, as I used to call him until he told me it made him feel like his father.
It isn’t a spoiler to explain a little bit about the mishap in Mexico, though I completely understand if some readers simply intrigued about the prospect of Marías writing about Elvis in Mexico want to turn their eyes here. For the others, this gives a glimpse at one theme Marías is playing with: the power of words, the power (or ills) of translation.
Elvis is making a movie, at least a part of which will be filmed in Mexico. However, Elvis “says he found out they pronounce the letter c differently in Spain and that’s how he wants to pronounce it.” Since our narrator happens to be the only person from Spain employed by the movie studio, he goes along to help Elvis with his accent (he’s going to sing one of the songs entirely in Spanish — err, but he hopes without the Mexican accent) and to act as a translator.
One night in a cantina, there’s a scuffle between Elvis and some shady characters. Our narrator gets caught in the middle:
“¿Qué ha dicho?” now it was Roland César’s turn to ask me. Their inability to understand each other was enraging them, a thing like that can really grate on your nerves in an argument.
“Que quién es usted para decir que nos vayamos.”
“Han oido, Julio, muchachos, me pregunta el gachupín que quién soy yo para ponerlos en la calle,” Montalbán answered without looking at me. I thought (if there was time for such a thought) that it was odd that he said I was the one asking who he was: it was Presley who was asking and I was only translating, it was a warning I didn’t pay attention to, or that I picked up on too late, when you relive what happened, or reconstruct it.
Bad Nature is funny (I hope that is apparent), but it is also surprisingly intense and psychologically acute. Marías trademark, nearly obsessive analyses are a part of that. Also, I think it is important to note that, for this reader, Esther Allen’s translation didn’t stand in the way at all. The prose flowed perfectly, allowing me to satisfy my craving in one sitting. I recommend this to any and all.
Earlier this year I reviewed Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear, and I didn’t quite know how to go about that task. I’m afraid it’s no easier trying to review the second volume, Dance and Dream (Tu rostro mañana, 2, Baile y sueño; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, 2006). Ah, but what a fascinating book to think about! And now that volume three is available in English, it’s the perfect time to find out just why these books are so difficult to speak about. (Incidentally, if you are in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area, Javier Marías is around you this week — details on New Directions’ webpage).
These volumes are dense, intimidating, full of sentences that weave in and out of themselves and each other — this is a remarkable feat of writing and translation. However, don’t get me wrong: I’ve found the books to be the type that, while intimidating and complex, is still approachable and incredibly gratifying. Perhaps — and I don’t know if I can really do this — I can show a bit of the sentence level style by divulging a bit about the overall structure of this volume.
The book begins where the last one ended: it’s night-time, and some woman who has been following Deza has just call him from the street. She wants to ask a favor, giving the book it’s opening lines:
Let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything, or even enquires, no advice or favour or loan, not even the loan of our attention, let us hope that others do not ask us to listen to them, to their wretched problems and their painful predicaments so like our own, to their incomprehensible doubts and their paltry stories which are so often interchangeable and have all been written before . . .
This sentence goes on for sometime before there is an end-stop, though it flows wonderfully, all the pieces tying together in a kind of spiderweb of clauses and phrases. But that is what the plot is too. From the encounter in the night, we shift to another evening when Deza is out with his boss, Bertram Tupra, entertaining a foreigner and his wife at a nightclub. Something goes wrong, and Deza is surprised when in the bathroom Tupra wields a sword and is threatening someone else with it. That particular part with the sword goes on for something like one hundred and twenty pages. Indeed, this is an example of where the global and local structure of the book mimic each other — there is a major delay before the end-stop comes. And intermingled in this scene that really lasts only a few seconds are dozens of tangents, each taking their cue from the story while at the same time priming the reader for what is to come. In a way the tangents teach the reader a number of perspectives for the actual action.
So what’s the point? Well, this is only volume two and, like volume one, it leaves many many things unanswered. But this is a fascinating narrative because the mind of Deza is always at work, analyzing and categorizing. That is why he has this secret job for the government — or so he thinks. Turns out there are private clients as well, so the job itself is part of the disturbing but ambiguous elements of the story.
I was glad to see that in the action, while a man wields a sword against another, Deza is able to find moments to devote to his wife. They’ve been separated for some time, and my last review ended with a very touching line about Luisa and Deza’s fading role in her life, the life they’d been doing together. Here is a sentence that takes us back to the first lines in the book while still moving the narrative along, taking us into their relationship and into some of the deeper themes in the novel:
Luisa did not get caught or entangled, but she did, once, become involved because of a request and a gift of alms and she involved me a little in both of these things too, this was before we separated and before I left for England, when we had not yet foreseen the deepening rift or our backs so firmly turned on each other, at least I had not, for it is only later on that you realise you have lost the trust you had in someone or that others have lost the trust they had in you — if, that is, you ever do realise, which I don’t really think you do; I mean, that only afterwards, when the present is already the past and is thus so changeable and uncertain that it can easily be told (and can be retold a thousand times more, with no two versions agreeing), do we realise that we also knew it when the present was still present and had not yet been rejected or become muddied or shadowy, how else would we be able to put a date to it, because the fact is we can, oh yes, we can date it afterwards with alarming precision: ‘It was the day when . . .’ we say or remember, as people do in novels (which are always heading toward a specific moment: the plot points to it, dictates it; except that not all novels know how they’re going to end), sometimes when we are alone or in company, two people summing things up out loud: ‘It was those words you came out with so casually on your birthday that first put me on my guard or began to distance me.’
And because, like I said, it is so very difficult to review this book intelligibly (you’ll just have to trust me and read them), I will end this review with another sad line as Deza mourns his loss. I think we’ll get quite a bit more of Luisa in the next volume.
They would last only until the disappearance once more of my renewed realisation that Luisa was not going to say to me: ‘Come, come back, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me, here’s your pillow which now bears not a trace, somehow I just couldn’t see you clearly before. Come here. Come with me. There’s no one else here, come back, my ghost has gone, you can take his place and dismiss his flesh. He has been changed into nothing and his time no longer advances. What was never happened. You can, I suppose, stay here for ever.’ Yes, that night would pass too, and she would still not have said these words.
Javier Marías’s name pops up frequently in the high altitudes of literary discussion. Several Nobel laureates and those deserving of the Nobel consider him a master (and also deserving of the Nobel). All of his books look incredibly interesting to me, but I hadn’t read any. Later this year the third and final volume in his trilogy Your Face Tomorrowwill be published in English. I’ve had my eye on these books since KevinfromCanada mentioned how much he enjoyed them and was looking forward to the last volume. His recommendation and the annual Nobel Prize hype was enough to convince me it was time to read Your Face Tomorrow, Volume I: Fever and Spear (Tu rostro mañana 1. Fiebre y lanza 2002; tr. from the Spanish by by Margaret Jull Costa 2005).
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
If you peruse the first lines of Marías’s books, I can almost guarantee you’ll want to read more . . . ahhh, I’ll indulge myself and put a few here for you to peruse—this is a post about Marías too.
I did not want to konw but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests.
—A Heart So White
And:
No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again.
—Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me
I feel that the opening of Fever and Spear is no exception, also offering an introduction that tantalizes the reader with strange details we only hope will get fleshed out in the novel:
One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion.
It is somewhat ironic, perhaps, that the narrator’s warning against telling people anything are the very lines that begin this story. The reason for these lines becomes quickly apparent: someone has betrayed the narrator, someone close, and tellinggave the means to the betrayal. Or, at least that’s what I think; we’re not told the whole story by a long shot in this first volume, and, while those lines are dealt with thematically, we don’t know how they relate directly to the narrator’s life yet. Not knowing the story, particularly the betrayer’s identity, however, is also part of the irony, for our narrator, Jaime (or Jacobo, or Jacque, or Iago, or Jack, depending on the speaker) Deza is astute—his powers of perception are capable of stripping the covers off of anybody in the room. Indeed, the job he acquires during this story was to simply observe people the government brought in for questioning. Are they telling the truth? But that’s just a general question. They get much more specific: What is that man’s relationship with that woman? Will that military leader kill the president in a coup should things get rough? His gift is a benefit to the government, but seems to be a bit of a curse to him:
I did, for some time, listen and notice and interpret and tell, and I was paid to do so during that time, but it was something I had always done and that I continue to do, passively and involuntarily, without effort and without reward, I probably can’t help it now, it’s just my way of being in the world, it will go with me to my death, and only then will I rest from it.
Mr. Deza’s family history is quite fascinating. His father and mother were highly involved in and highly persecuted in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, his father’s life was nearly taken from him as a result betrayal from his best friend. When young, Deza asked his father if he had an intuition that his friend was capable of such betrayal. No. His father said that never did he see any indication in his friend. Never did he doubt, and even in retrospect cannot see where he should have doubted. Deza cannot accept this.
But even so. How could he have spent half his life with a colleague, a close friend—half his childhood, his schooldays, his youth—without having so much as an inkling of his true nature, or, at least, of his possible nature? (But perhaps any nature is possible in all of us.) How can someone not see, in the long term, that the person who does end up ruining us will indeed ruin us? How can you not sense or guess at their plotting, their machinations, their circular dance, not smell their hostility or breathe their despair, not notice their slow skulking, their leisurely, languishing waiting, and the inevitable impatience that they would have had to contain for who knows how many years? How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you will show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?
I’m finding this review difficult to write. I cannot capture, not even close, the amount of depth to this story. It’s incredibly dense and requires some time to digest. Betrayal, while so far the focus of this review, is actually in this book a side note, almost incidental, though it seems it will come up in future volumes. Perhaps it is best, then, to tell a bit about the book’s structure. I don’t want my lack of ability to affect your desire to get to know this amazing book. Give me a bit more time.
This book is structured around a few simple events: Peter Wheeler, a father-figure teacher Deza knew while at Oxford, has asked Deza to come to a party. Deza is back in London from Spain, having just separated from his wife. Wheeler asks Deza to observe an individual at this party, one Bertram Tupra, who will be attending the party with his new girlfriend. Tupra arrives with a woman introduced as Beryl. Deza does attends and tries to do as he was told. Here’s some of the humor in the book.
‘Tell me, what did you think of Beryl? How did she strike you? What impression did she make?’
‘Beryl?’ I said, caught slightly offguard, I hadn’t imagined he would ask me about her, but rather about his friend Bertram, if he was a friend, and about whom he forewarned me. ‘Well, we barely spoke really, she seemed to take very little notice of anyone else, and she didn’t appear to be enjoying herself much either, as if she was here out of duty. But she’s got very good legs, and she knows she has and makes the most of them. She’s got rather too many teeth and too big a jaw, but she’s still rather pretty. Her smell is the most attractive thing about her, her best feature: an unusual, pleasant, very sexual smell.’
Wheeler shot me a glance that was a mixture of reproof and mockery, although his eyes seemed amused. . . . ‘As I’ve todl you before, you’re far too alone dodwn there in London. That isn’t what I meant at all. I would never have dared even to ask myself if you had or hadn’t found Beryl’s animal humours stimulating, you’ll have to forgive my lack of curiosity about your proclivities in that area. I meant regarding Tupra, what impression did you have about her in relation to him, in her relation to him now. That’s what I want to know, not if you were aroused by her . . .’, he paused for a moment, ‘by her secretions. What do you take me for?’
That’s as far into the novel as I’ll take you, but I think it’s still worth mentioning the compelling discussions in the book about the Spanish Civil War and about the “Keep Silent” propaganda passed around during World War II. All of it ties together nicely in this volume, but I hope it broadens out in the next volumes.
To close this review, I’d like to move away from the thematic elements inherent in the book’s prose and structure. Some of the most compelling parts of the book actually don’t contain such political or intellectual overtones. Rather, they are very intimate. Deza is deeply lonely in London, and he’s most sympathetic when he yearns for his family in Spain.
. . . it’s wretched knowing the precise habits of a house from which you are suddenly absent and to which you return now only as a visitor and always with prior warning or like a close relative and only occasionally, yet remain caught in the web of settings and rhythms that you established and which sheltered you and seemed impossible without your contribution and without your existence . . .
At its heart, it seems (I’ll have to wait until I know more to be more sure) to be a novel about more than just our perception of others but also about how those perspectives shape our perspective of ourself.
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