Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear (Vol. 1) (New Directions Books) [Paperback]

Javier Marías (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2007 | Series: New Directions Books

A daring masterwork by Javier Marias: "Spain's most subtle and gifted writer." (The Boston Globe)

Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow is a wholly remarkable display of the immense gifts of Javier Marias. With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new--espionage.

Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler—retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy—recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence. Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty's secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century. This compelling and enigmatic tour de force from one of Europe's greatest writers continues with Volume Two, Dance and Dream.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The mechanisms of reflection and digression, broken down into their tiniest constituent parts, are always the focus of attention in Spanish novelist Marías's sophisticated novels (A Heart So White; Dark Back of Time; etc.). In his leisurely, incisive latest, these preoccupations fuel a plot with a spy-novel gloss. Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is at loose ends in London when his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler, a retired Oxford don, introduces him to the head of a secret government bureau of elite analysts with the ability to see past people's facades and predict their future behavior. A cocktail party test proves Deza to be one of the elect, and he goes to work clandestinely observing all sorts of people, from South American generals to pop stars. Deza also brings his finely tuned mind to bear on Wheeler's mysterious past and on his own family history, both of which are shadowed by the Spanish Civil War. Marías's long-drawn-out dance of withholding and revelation comes to a halt mid-step—the book is the first half of a single larger work, not a stand-alone volume—but readers with an appreciation for the author's deliberate, exquisite prose won't mind waiting for the second volume. (June 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Marías’s most extravagant showcase for ‘literary thinking’ so far. It also serves as a compelling introduction to his writing.” (Wyatt Mason - The New Yorker )

“Fever and Spear entangles and fascinates readers and critics who have variously compared it with the novels of Dostoevsky, Proust and Beckett.” (Ian Mitchell - Times Literary Supplement )

“Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and rightly so.” (The Observer )

“The overall effect recalls the cerebral play of Borges, the dark humor of Pynchon, and meditative lyricism of Proust.” (Review of Contemporary Fiction )

“By one of the most original writers at work today, Your Face Tomorrow [is] as accomplished and sui generis as all his mature work [and the] most affecting narrative feat in Marías’s work to date.” (The New York Times Book Review )

“This brilliant trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age.” (Antony Beevor - The Sunday Telegraph [London] )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; Reprint edition (September 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217272
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217279
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #362,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable, but I must reserve judgment on whether it is Marias's best December 27, 2009

By R. M. Peterson TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am convinced that Javier Marías is one of the world's greatest living authors. "The Dark Back of Time" probably is one of the ten best books I have ever read, and "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" is an exceptional novel, with "A Heart So White" not far behind. So I approached this first volume of Marías's trilogy, presumably his magnum opus, with great anticipation. But having read it, I find that I will have to reserve judgment at least until I read Volumes II and III.

Javier Marías is not an easy author to read, but one does become accustomed to his convoluted sentences and his narrative sprawl and digressions. Still, I don't believe a newcomer to Marías should make YOUR FACE TOMORROW his introduction to Marías's elaborate, almost baroque, style. Further, the plot is thin, tissue-paper thin, much less substantial than in his other novels that I have read. And while there are many wonderful passages of astute observations or profound meditations, there also are passages that I find pointless, seemingly nothing more than Marías showing off (although I recognize that they may take on significance in Volume II or III).

The narrator, ostensibly, is the same Spaniard who narrated "All Souls." There he had the false name "Emilio"; here he is Jaime Deza (or Jacobo or Jacques). He is separated from his wife Luisa and young son, and he is back in Great Britain, specifically Oxford and London. Most of the novel pertains to either of two situations: one, Deza's lengthy conversations with Sir Peter Wheeler, an elderly Oxford professor and ex-MI6 agent, or two, Deza's work "interpreting" people (i.e., assessing or evaluating them) for a group with nebulous connections to British intelligence services....

As is typical of Marías, there are numerous digressions into various and sundry subjects. One of the most prominent such discursive subjects is the Spanish Civil War, and Deza's ruminations often turn to the experiences of his parents and injustices they suffered at the hands of the fascists and their toadies. (Marías's own father was persona non grata with and under Franco, and I suspect - although I don't know this for certain - that much of the family history of the fictional Jaime Deza is the history of the real Javier Marías.)

The blurring of fact and fiction, characteristic of Marías's other work, seems also to be operative in YOUR FACE TOMORROW: VOL. I. Other themes are trust and betrayal (which lends the novel its title in the form of the question "How can I know today your face tomorrow?"), confidences and secrets, human speech versus silence, names and identity, memory and time, the present versus the past, and the absolute terminality of death.

As in most of Marías's other books, the title is taken from Shakespeare, in this instance from "Henry IV, Second Part" (Act II, Scene 2, line 14). Other plays from Shakespeare also are referred or alluded to. In addition, Marías makes very effective use of the dying words of Cervantes ("Farewell, wit; farewell, charm . . .") and a haunting quote from Rilke's First "Duino Elegy" (beginning "It is strange to inhabit the earth no longer").

But Marías is not simply a literary recycler. He is himself a complex and original thinker and a distinguished craftsman of language (albeit vicariously transmitted to us in what surely is a magnificent translation from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa). YOUR FACE TOMORROW, VOL. I is studded with notable passages. I will offer one, which I hope will convey some sense of Marías's style. It is part of a brilliant critique of the modern political fad of reparations:

"Who do our representatives and our governments think they are, asking forgiveness in the name of those who were free to do what they did and who are now dead? What right have they to make amends for them, to contradict the dead? * * * A person is a person and does not continue to exist through his remote descendants, not even his immediate ones, who often prove unfaithful; and these transactions and gestures do nothing for those who suffered, for those who really were persecuted and tortured, enslaved and murdered in their one, real life; they are lost for ever in the night of time and in the night of infamy, which is doubtless no less long. To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are not formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads, of their pierced breasts, or their broken bones and slit throats."

Like W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías is fascinated with the past. How can we know the past? How can we memorialize it? How can we even begin to tell it without distorting or destroying it? As for the present, "It's a curse, * * * it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing." Read more ›

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A difficult but rewarding read February 14, 2010

By P. A. Doornbos

Format:Paperback

This book is the first part of a trilogy which has just been completed. I came across the author because of a truly wonderful story about his fear of flying in the summer 2009 issue of Granta. More recently, The Economist highly recommended the (third volume of the) trilogy, acknowledging that readers have to cope with several problems.
This first part is a personal and a family history, and a history of the Spanish civil war, by a man endowed with a unique talent. He is able-on the basis of brief encounters (interviews, sometimes observations with only a few words exchanged)- to assess persons, know them better than they know themselves and put his findings on paper, in report form. It is a very rare gift and his talent is turned into employment by a shady agency in London, after his marriage in Madrid breaks up. The agency and the history of his sponsors suggest he is hired to play a role in support of post-Cold War intelligence work. After all, he lived in the UK before he married, lecturing in Oxford, building a network of friends. Interesting!
However, Jaime Marias(JM) is his own writer, full of ideas and ambitions beyond a simple spy novel. The way the novel is written has led one Amazon.uk reviewer to give up reading well before reaching the half-way point. Why? Most pages are solid blocks of text, indentations are few, white lines absent. Fortunately, the chapters are fairly short. Real dialogues are rare. Usually, one character answers a question and holds forth for pages on end. It is sometimes interrupted by page-long musings by the hero himself, and then the lecturing continues. Is it a book written for women rather than men?
But it is also on occasion a warm, passionate book because of the personal ingredients.... His description of the emotions at work during a break-up are unsurpassed: the fury, the incomprehension, the doomed efforts to win back a loved one, the autism received. Same for definitions and examples of betrayal in general. The description of the hero's frenzied midnight search in his mentor's library for details about the Spanish civil war is superb.
After finishing this book, I was in need of something else. But I will read Part Two of JM's trilogy, because he has really made me curious about what happened before and happens next. Read more ›

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Nothing happens February 6, 2010

By JGP821

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fever and Spear is an interesting read, but VERY slow. The lead character has a special talent for discerning whether someone is lying, and for predicting how they will act during a crisis. Most readers of suspense fiction would expect that this talent will be put to some use, and that thereby will hang the tale . . . . but that's not what happens here. It takes the whole book to get the talent described and shown in operation; and then the book ends. In the meantime we find out a considerable amount about the lead character's ex-wife, his father (a journalist who was on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War) his academic friends in England, and so on.

But nothing HAPPENS.

Don't read this expecting a thriller. On the other hand, if you want a psychological study of a character, you might consider it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Penetrating thoughts; no dramatic payoff; unworthy suspense November 14, 2011

By David Bowen

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I know this review is a little long, but although I did not thoroughly enjoy this work, it provoked a great deal of thinking that I think may be interesting and helpful. In fact, it is an edited version of a slightly longer piece I will soon be posting to a literary blog. Please let me know if you are interested.

Both nothing and so much seem to happen in the first of three books that constitute Javier Marías' noir-tinted intellectual opus Your Face Tomorrow. At least, those who've enjoyed Henry James may not be put off by the slowness of the action--although it seems there might actually be less dramatic action across 350 pages of Marías than in any story by James! So much time and so many pages are devoted to the at-first seemingly mundane event of a single evening, an awkward and stuffy house party, most of Oxford dons. However, so much is built up beforehand, and the scene of the small house party itself so extended by lengthy interruptions largely summing up the events of the following months--that this mundane evening unsurprisingly turns out to be anything but. In fact, it is so built up that it disappoints; and disappointment regarding dramatic action persists until the end of this volume, dense with Proust-style paragraphs. Yet it is only the first of a trilogy--surely so much more of interest is bound to occur over the next two volumes. Having just read this first volume however, I feel it is an uncertain investment.

If the reader is looking for narrative drama and strongly distinguished characters, I would recommend coming back to Marías after you've gained that satisfaction elsewhere.

The characters are uniformly gnomic and impossible to sympathize with.... They are unsentimental which is fine; but they express little beyond their own judgments about people and the world generally. These judgments are very eloquent--the narrator and his Oxford mentor, the elderly Wheeler, speak with Marías' voice. The author clearly has a strong moral conscience, and the most interesting passages concern how easily people can allow themselves to slip into and take active part into fascism, specifically focusing here on the Spanish Civil War. Marías is not just concerned with Spain however. A better part of the novel is concerned with the WWII British domestic propaganda aimed to get British citizen and soldier alike to `keep mum' and be wary of German spies. With a readiness to silence themselves even in the most innocuous circumstances, Wheeler tells our protagonist that the real surprise was that the campaign resulted in everyday people talking as much as they could, loudly and in public. Inadvertently, they'd been led to believe that what they had on their minds might be important to someone--a first for many, perhaps most who thought they were simply nobodies and know-nothings. The point is, Marías has his two main characters insist, that talking is what every human has in common. We all talk. And this constitutes the base of our freedom as human beings.

And of course it is all very clear from the start that the entire work will be exploring how some very clever individuals (the characters in this novel) want to continually find ways to exploit that to their own darkly Machiavellian ends. It is the narrator who is cajoled and sucked into this gray world. It is a gray London world; the characters work in a featureless, unnamed building, for an unnamed organization of no certain agenda, although clearly high-political.

But do not hold your breath for suspense à la Clancy or Le Carré. Much is made of Ian Fleming; and Marías regales us with the names of many classic detective novelists as Deza the protagonist wanders Wheeler's immaculate library. We also learn there about lesser-known events of the Spanish Civil War.

Not only does the novel lack worthwhile dramatic suspense, the sort of suspense that doesn't require a cheap payoff, as for instance, Ishiguro poignantly illustrated in his powerful When We Were Orphans. Your Face Tomorrow lacks the sort of characters many Anglophone readers gravitate towards--those with humor, charm, even exuberance (this especially in America, since England seems to have all-but left behind Dickensian vitality). Marías writes eminently European fiction--international and sophisticated, measured and poised, deliberate and perhaps overly artificial, cool and pessimistic.

Even so, among the novel's handful of life sketches, those reports on Deza's interpretations of those he watches--as paid voyeur--that extend beyond a mere half-page are immensely creative, clearly the result of someone who understands a wide variety of personalities, their strengths and illnesses, peculiarities and manias. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere! None of those characters are dramatically developed; they are described, interpreted. The interpreter, the narrator, is himself nearly a cipher, almost admittedly so. One nameless female judge is the most intriguing: she's buried or `deadened' (exactly how is unknown and unreported by Deza's `interpretation') "the memory of atrocities and disappointments," "wrapping them in the smoke of accumulated years," where they slowly and inevitably take on "the consistency and configuration of dreams," dreams of things that might well have never happened. The subjunctive strikes again. This is powerful writing. It does seem to speak to how we bury our disappointments. But no, Marías is not going to flesh any of these details out; this is just a brief, interpretive sketch of what might be, or rather might have been. Of course, Deza is an ever-so-minimally dramatic example of that deadening of the awareness of disappointment and life's mutability.
It seems unclear then what Marías want us to make of his art as a novelist!

Granted, Dickensian characters might seem like caricatures in comparison to Marías' weighty consciousnesses--although they are not so distinctly distinguished as the weighty minds populating James' literary universe. But a comparison to America's greatest and too-little-read novelist is perhaps unfair--although Marías clearly has a Jamesian striving.

But damn it, I want fully realized vitalities, the exuberance and helplessness of a Mr. Micawber, a Huck Finn, even a Gatsby (hello, Don Draper), even a Leopold Bloom, just wondering around the city streets, thoughts a-burble in all directions. Marías will never create any larger-than-life figures, let alone a Tyrone Slothrop. His Deza is an invisible man--even Ellison's Invisible Man overshadows him!

Marías as a novelist has a handful of conceits; he could be a great essayist however. Read more ›