Customer Reviews

Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (Vol. 2)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

...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.

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.

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.

I can't believe I'll have to wait at least two years for the third volume. Just like Fever and Spear, the sequel ended in a crescendo of questions, flashbacks, cliffhangers and teases. Marias is an author that takes some getting used to but once you do, once you stop thinking about what happens next and simply take in each of the anecdotes and flashbacks and slowly-revealed plot points as they come, you will be hooked. If you haven't read Marias before, I would recommend starting with his short novel, The Man of Feeling, or with the short stories. Come back later for Your Face Tomorrow because it is definitely a masterpiece.

Marias's first novel in the YFT series had me hooked. His treatment of things like time, remembrance, betrayal etc. are exquisite, and really give the reader a new perspective on a lot of things (or at least a 20 year old reader like myself). Anyone looking into Dance and Dream MUST read his first installment, because the second references the first on almost every other page. That being said, the second novel is a bit of a disappointment. I do agree with others that it is not so much a trilogy as one long novel, but like some large novels, this middle passage is a bit of a quagmire. Little new is introduced, and the slow (but very bearable) pace of the first is slowed down in the second. Not too many new insights are unearthed in the second novel, and I have found myself skipping pages with no remorse.

However, let me just say that I still love Marias and expect the third novel, when I get to it, to be fantastic (the Economist rated it to be one of the best books of the year it came out in, 2009 or 2010). So in all the trilogy is definitely worth the effort, but don't expect the second novel to be as good as the first.

Spaniard Jaime/Jacobo/Jack/Jacques Deza ("interpreter of people, translator of lives") works for Bertram Putra's secretive and unnamed agency in London in a building with no name. He is a person with a mind in continuous overdrive, assessing, analysing, speculating and associating. Part 1 of the trilogy ended with a cliff hanger, with Deza being followed at night walking home. Part 2 provides a partial answer: the pursuer's identity is disclosed, also the request made to Deza, and Deza's compliance. But not why he does so.
This book is a superb study about the concept of fear and how to instil it, with real time and historical examples, such as horrific events during the Spanish civil war and the terror inflicted by the criminal, sword-wielding Kray twins in London in the 1960s. It gathers weight and speed in the second half, when Deza accompanies his boss to a nightclub for an important meeting during which Deza has to keep the wife of Tupra's contact happy, pleased with herself. What happens next is truly superior descriptive writing about fear and its application and provides the reader with two cliff hangers: Tupra decides Deza is still too naive for his own good, has his priorities wrong and drives him to his own home for further instruction. Before that, Tupra asked/ordered Deza to accompany him on a foreign mission.
In Part Three, Deza is going to be shown the facts of life, one way or the other. Part 1 and 2 provide a backdrop for a dramatic and resounding finale in Part 3. Will Deza be welcomed back by his wife in Madrid? Will the mystery about the bloodstain on spy master Wheeler's staircase be solved conclusively? Etc., etc.
On the rebound from Part 1, I reread a few early novels by John Le Carre, the best writer on espionage. They hark back to the early 1960s. They proved to be timeless and fantastic entertainment. Marias' spy trilogy has been subordinated to lots of other ideas and memories and concerns and ambitions. He is longwinded and not as accessible as Le Carre, many of whose books require, after all, careful reading. There are occasional nasty asides in Part 2: I share his distaste for Berlusconi, but why do women wearing berets deserve to be shot? Spanish readers may see more ultra-swift, one sentence-long character murders in this volume.
The plots thickens, the tension mounts. Volume 3, after all, equals the two introductory books in size and weight.

The October 2006 book for my reading club: nearly 300 pages of a writer who is considered as a serious candidate to be a future Nobel Prize winner. But I was not impressed, it even irritated me (something that seldomly happens with books): pompous style, unclear contents, long sentences that just list events/things/persons. I thought that the problem might be in the translation, but when I tried the Spanish version it was just as awful. And since life is too short for unreadable books I stopped after 2 attempts and 67 pages (which meant that I gave it a serious try).