14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you are serious about good literature, October 23, 2006
This review is from: Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (Vol. 2) (Hardcover)
...then Marias is worth the time and effort. Perhaps one should not begin with Your Face Tomorrow. A Heart so White might be a better place to start. But as the next installment in the growing Marias body of work, Your Face Tomorrow shows that we are in the presence of something serious and enduring. Not for those seeking easy adventure. Marias demands that you think. He requires an openness to what a novel, or indeed, (why not?) an adventure might be. While the Tu rostro series has yet to be concluded, and while I have no idea where Marias is heading with it, I trust that, as with all of his previous work, it will have been worth the long, interesting, curious journey.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The second installment of Marias's most ambitious novel -- but is it his best?, February 11, 2010
This is the second volume of what is commonly referred to as Javier Marías's magnum opus. Maybe YOUR FACE TOMORROW is so called because it is three volumes and 1273 pages long. But so far - after reading Volumes One and Two -- I would not accord YFT the honor of "magnum opus" based on intrinsic merit. It is good and it is certainly ambitious, but it also is long-winded and at times tedious. As I wrote in my Amazon review of Volume One, I should reserve judgment until I have read the entire work, but for me, having now read Volume Two, Marías has even more to do in Volume Three to push YFT to the forefront of his oeuvre, to truly make it his magnum opus. I suppose that also is a roundabout way of saying that Volume Two is not as good as Volume One.
Reading Volume Two clarified one point for me - namely, that YOUR FACE TOMORROW is not a trilogy. Instead, it is one novel, with seven parts, published in three volumes - the first containing the parts Spear and Fever; this, the second, containing the parts Dance and Dream; and the third, the parts Poison, Shadow, and Farewell. Therefore, unless you are somewhat perverse, do NOT begin reading Volume Two unless you already have read Volume One. Much in Volume Two assumes familiarity with Volume One, and reading this rather difficult novel will be rendered more difficult if one does not have that background. What this also means is that YFT is a bloody long novel. I have made a personal point of not reading any book longer than 1000 pages (there are too many good books out there and life is too short), and had I fully appreciated, when I began Volume One, that I was embarking on a 1273 page trek, I probably would have passed, even though the author is Javier Marías.
The setting of Volume Two is London. Jaime Deza is still working for a secretive group that may be associated with the British intelligence services. Most of the present action takes place in a London night club, and for much of that time (as measured by number of pages) Deza is in either the ladies' room or the handicapped bathroom. But, as is typical with Marías, much of the narrative is taken up by flashbacks and digressions.
Many of the themes are also familiar to readers of Marías - death; time; secrets, trust, and betrayal - although they are not developed as extensively as in some other Marías novels. Themes somewhat new to Marías's work, at least in my experience, are fear, war, and violence. (There is, in passing, a very critical comment about the United States' excursion into Iraq.) There also are many humorous passages (more than in Volume One); some of them are subtle, some sly and wicked, some farcical, and some dark. And, per usual, there is a mélange of esoteric motifs, among them bloodstains, the song "The Streets of Laredo", Botox, swords (particularly a Landsknecht sword), the Spanish Civil War, and the assassinated Nazi Reinhard Heydrich and Lidice.
The ending of Volume Two is very much a tease for Volume Three, which I plan to read in another month or so. When I do, I hope to be able to report my judgment on whether YOUR FACE TOMORROW is indeed Marías's magnum opus or, as I now suspect, something a little less.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marias' magnum opus - an experiential spy novel, December 14, 2008
The "Your Face Tomorrow" trilogy is Javier Marias' magnum opus and quite possibly the reason for a potential Nobel Prize in the near future. Its style is experiential, at times employing stream-of-consciousness techniques.
Both of the two novels currently available in English (part three is due in 2009) are centered around a single event; in this case a visit to a night club. Marias cleverly uses flashbacks and foreshadowing to weave together the various levels of narrative. Marias fans will also recognise strands from earlier books, although it can be appreciated without any further reading (however it is recommended to read part one).
Jacques Deza, a Spaniard living in London, is gifted with the most incredible powers of observation which he puts to use working for an unnamed fraction of the English secret service. As time goes by, he begins to realise the impact of his analyses on the lives of others, which culminates in a choice between life and death in the night club scene.
In short, this is a highly eclectic combination of genres and styles - imagine Proust writing an existentialist spy novel in the 21st century. Javier's epic sentences can drag on for pages, but they are so incredibly precise that no word is ever superfluous. If you shy away from lengthy sentences, start with one of his earlier books -
All Souls is recommended. Otherwise, give it some time and you will find yourself churning through this book - his most mature and ambitious to date.
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