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

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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. Its humour, too; aside from being one of the most poised and cultivated of fictional narrators, Jacques Deza is also one of the most amusing. His defiantly snobbish asides on the trashiness of our times are priceless, while the situations he finds himself in, however unpleasant, almost always have something farcical about them that keeps laughter in play along with horror. Indeed, remarkably little actually happens in Fever and Spear -- but Marías cloaks enough in mystery to make for a sense of suspense throughout.

My next line of inquiry was to try to determine the significance of certain themes: e.g., translation and interpretation; and recurring phrases: e.g., fever and spear (which appears in the title of the first volume). 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.). A lengthy section late in the novel focusses on the campaign in the Second World War against "careless talk" in Britain, where everyone was warned against revealing any information that might be of use to the enemy -- because you never knew who might be the enemy. siz izleniyor ve dinleniliyorsunuz. Farkında bile olmaksızın hem de.. Sizi dinleyen yakınlarınız da olabilir, sizi izleyen komşunuz da.. This last question is especially relevant, when you recognise that, even within the first part, there are different styles and subject matter.

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It may be all that is left if one cannot trust anyone. Then, one cannot give oneself over to anyone or anything, a painting included. Gathering facts by those removed from self-intrusion either through will or an absence of self will theoretically lead to an assessment of who people are and who they will be in the future. Their face tomorrow. This is one of those books that makes me confused about my own literary tastes, which is something that I certainly appreciate. I think of myself as a girl who needs robust narrative and appreciates a certain down-to-earthiness in my novels, but I guess I'm not, or I wouldn't get into shit 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. How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it ?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. Extremely hard to read, as every sentence is beautifully crafted but to the point of being over-written and elaborate, often piling on a series of repetitions; as an example (which could actually be referring to large parts of the book) It's a lumpy, unblended mixture of Marías's well-known biography, personal gripes about society (better expressed in his journalism for the Sunday supplement of El País), and historical or literary concerns, with fictional ingredients that look thin or preposterous by comparison." - Lorna Scott Fox, London Review of Books