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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