Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (Vol. 3) [Hardcover]

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

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2009

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías’s daring novel in three parts culminates triumphantly in this much-anticipated final volume.

Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías’s three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed “exquisite“ (Publishers Weekly), “gorgeous” (Kirkus), and “outstanding: another work of urgent originality” (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza—hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception—back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Marias concludes his enormously praised and disquieting trilogy with the last increment of Jacques Deza's story, finding him recruited as a character analyst by a shady British intelligence agency. He's working for Bertram Tupra, who welcomes Jacques into the intelligence fold by using him in his plot to assault a Spanish embassy employee. Soon, Tupra shows him horrifying blackmail videos gathered by the agency that poison Jacques's soul. The effect of this poison becomes apparent when Deza returns to Madrid to see his father and his estranged wife, Luisa, who sports a black eye presumably inflicted by her boyfriend, Estaban Custardoy. Jacques begins to secretly track down Custardoy with the intent of persuading him never to see Luisa again, and when Jacques finally confronts Custardoy, Marias's masterful depiction of the ecstasy of violence makes it difficult not to exult in Jacques's barbarous behavior. The intrigue yet to come pushes Jacques into a crisis of conscience. Costa does a flawless job of translating the strange mixture of high cultural references and Jacques's essentially thrillerlike story line, making for a reading experience like no other. (Nov.)
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Review

“The fear and pain that Marías has built up for a thousand pages oozes out like oily fate.” (Justin McNeil - Bomblog )

“His most moving and personal work to date.” (Megan Doll - The Believer )

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

“A seriousness of purpose, an eagerness to engage with ... metaphysical questions and to incorporate them into a gripping story.” (Tess Lewis - New Criterion )

“A literary tour de force ... as much about the past from which we are made as the present we have become.” (The Economist )

“Like the other volumes in the sequence, Poison, Shadow and Farewell is as stealthy as any spy.” (Louise Welsh - Financial Times )

“This talented and prolific "new Proust" has completed the third book of his monumental trilogy.... The long sentences and paragraphs dear to Marias, a wordsmith translator of Sterne's Tristram Shandy as well as works by Faulkner, Conrad, and Nabokov, are a delight to navigate as the author pursues with surgical precision his relentless quest to discover what motivates the actions of his characters. Recommended.” (Library Journal )

“This novel…crowns Marías's trilogy and his translator's lively English rendering of it with narrative honor.” (John Spurling - Times Onlne [UK] )

“This deeply strange creation…may very well be the first authentic literary masterpiece of the 21st century.” (James Lasdun - The Guardian [UK] )

“Poison, Shadow and Farewell delivers a payoff at the end, but the real challenge, and pleasure, is in getting there.” (Larry Rohter - The New York Times )

“Quite unlike anything else today…. One of the finest novels of modern times.” (Tim Martin - The Telegraph [UK] )

“The strange mixture of high cultural references and Jaques' essentially thriller-like story line, make for a reading experience like no other.” (Washington Examiner )

“The conclusion…is to be reminded of the intricacy with which he has fitted his pieces into the larger part.” (Colin Torre - Kansas City Free Press )

“Here's the wonderfully parenthetical operations of a human mind in the 21st century.” (Mauro Javier Cardenas - San Francisco Chronicle )

“He mediates thriller or noir scenarios through a formidably erudite and elegant and sophisticated consciousness.” (Mark Ford - New York Review of Books )

“Marías's own seemingly infinite imaginings broaden and complicate the novel form—illuminating the undersides of the past and its characters.” (David Haglund - The National [Abu Dhabi] )

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

“Like so much of Marías's extraordinary writing, it is unforgettable.” (Margaret Drabble - Times Literary Supplement )

“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 )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 556 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1 edition (December 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811218120
• ISBN-13: 978-0811218122
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This literary trek comes to an end. Conclusion? Worthwhile, but neither great nor essential., May 17, 2010

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R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (Vol. 3) (Hardcover)

This is Volume Three of a 1273-page novel. It would be unwise to read Volume Three without having first read Volumes One and Two (which I have separately reviewed on Amazon). The real question, then, becomes whether reading all 1273 pages is a good use of one's finite reading time. That, of course, entails consideration of YOUR FACE TOMORROW ("YFT") in its entirety. Before turning to that issue, a few paragraphs on Volume Three.

In Volume Three, the first-person narrator, Jaime (or Jacobo or Jacques or Iago) Deza continues his story of working in London for an unnamed section of British intelligence (MI6 or SIS). The group is engaged in "interpreting" people - observing or spying on them, often from behind one-way mirrors or by watching videotapes, and then analyzing their character and personality and predicting how they would (or will) act in certain situations in the future. (What will be thy face tomorrow?) It fits nicely with Deza's voyeuristic tendencies as he passively floats through life, and although unusual it seems to be a fairly innocuous way of making a comfortable living. In the middle of Volume Three, Deza returns to his native Madrid for a two-week visit to his estranged wife Luisa, his two children, and his elderly father. Once there, Deza, to protect his wife and children (as he sees matters), is roused from his passive mode of existence and spurred to take action of a violent form. He then returns to London to find out that one of his seemingly innocuous interpretations (of a pop/rock star!) has had violent, lethal consequences. The synchronicity of these events raises all sorts of questions about whether it is possible to chart a moral course of conduct through life. (Or, is it better, in the words of the very first sentence of Volume One of the novel, to "never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories"?) These questions become even more thorny when Deza learns about clandestine activities ("black propaganda") during WWII in a final farewell conversation with his mentor Sir Peter Wheeler (who is modeled very closely after the real-life Sir Peter Russell, to whom YFT is dedicated). In the last 25 pages, the life of Jaime Deza - though now diminished by the deaths of two figures for whom there can be no replacement - settles into an uneasy stasis of sorts.

Volume Three is better than Volume Two, if not quite as satisfying or intellectually thrilling as Volume One. The predominant themes include secrets, treachery and betrayal, counterfeiting and forgeries (and thus, by implication, authenticity and the truth), war (and its invariable handmaiden, deceit), time and memory and personal identity, and love and separation. The book is rich with cultural references, both high- and low-brow, including Jayne Mansfield and "her triumphant, intimidating, transatlantic décolletage", Ian Fleming and the James Bond films, Robert Louis Stevenson, hip-hop and rap ("that witless, worthless drivel"), several paintings in the Prado, the film "The Godfather", and literary quotations from Shakespeare, Cervantes, St. Augustine, Ecclesiastes, and Eliot. Touchingly, and appropriately, the novel ends with a line from "The Streets of Laredo".

Throughout YFT, but probably more so in Volume Three than in the two earlier volumes, Marías reprises characters, events, and verbatim extracts from his earlier fiction. (The fellow who becomes Deza's nemesis was a relatively minor character in "A Heart So White".) Recognizing these references can be fun for a reader of the earlier works. In addition, many of the themes are the same, or are variations on or developments of themes from the earlier works. And the convoluted, obsessively meditative writing style is the same.

For me, the lesson of YFT is that speaking, or loving, or even living in this world entails risks of moral compromise. But an odd, and naggingly dissatisfying, thing about the novel is that for Marías "this world" is essentially a solipsistic world.

My conclusion: In YFT, Javier Marías bit off somewhat more than he could chew. It is a very ambitious work that does not altogether succeed. I want to emphasize that there are many brilliant passages and several memorable scenes. But there also is too much dead wood. The narrative often is rococo in nature, and at times it is disingenuous and redundant. There is too much authorial showing-off (or self-indulgence). I believe that the novel could have been pruned by at least a third without significant loss - and therefore should have been pruned. (Much of that lopping off would come from Volume Two.) Furthermore, the novel, as a whole, does not hang together; there are too many loose ends (for example, whatever happened with Incompara?).

YFT is very worthwhile fiction, but it is not great literature. It does not measure up to two previous novels by Marías - "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" and "A Heart So White" - nor does it measure up to his "The Dark Back of Time". Those three works, to my mind, are great literature, and I recommend them highly to one and all. YFT, on the other hand, gets a qualified recommendation to those who already are Javier Marías enthusiasts. No doubt YFT would be richer upon re-reading, but I am pretty sure that I will never get around to doing so.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A slow but wonderful journey, March 1, 2010

By 

Yuri Trash (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (Vol. 3) (Hardcover)

I agree that you must start at the first book. The third is, as one would expect, where the pieces fit together. I don't think it's overdoing it to describe the trilogy as one of the great works of modern literature. I have rarely read a novel as full of wisdom, insight, and provocative ideas, as Your Face Tomorrow. It is not always an easy read, it is dense, it takes digressions, and a key scene may stretch over 80 trance-like pages. At its heart though is a quiet rage at the violence done by man, particularly during the Spanish Civil War when Marias' father was targeted. The justifications for that violence and its consequences (whether the intention was deliberate or accidental), are at the heart of these books. And Your Face Tomorrow is also a thriller - albeit not in the conventional sense - acquiring a slow-burn intensity that drives you to its final pages.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All 's fair in Love and War, February 2, 2010

By 

P. A. Doornbos - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (Vol. 3) (Hardcover)

An alternative title for a review of this phenomenal final part of the trilogy could be, "One should never tell Anything to Anyone", a dictum of Sir Peter Wheeler, former Oxford don, spy during WW II and the Spanish civil war. He was close to members of an ultra-secret group of people charged with "black propaganda", aimed to create chaos in Germany, during WW II. He gives this advice to the trilogy's hero Jaime (etc.) Deza, who works for a 21st century version of this ex-WW II group without a name, working in a building without a name, which has co-opted its staff of no more than seven on his say so, regardless of nationality, no oath required. Privatisation of intelligence gathering is only one of many themes in this volume.

Words can kill, knowingly or unknowingly. This volume provides plenty of evidence: slips of the tongue, vile accusations, a simple idea to discredit an SS-officer, and the horrible (un)intended consequences. To win a war requires total determination, anything and everything is allowed despite there always being innocent victims. In smaller campaigns like scaring away a competitor for the love of the mother of one's children, the application of fear and violence also requires absolute determination. Who in this line of business is determined enough and can also cope with the outcome? And what will survivors of such actions do?

This third volume and the entire trilogy indeed, is a very deep piece of work, very (auto-)biographical, full of urgent and timeless themes, worked into a beautiful fabric of memories of wars, conversations, observation of videos of hideous scenes, and illustrated by ideas gained from posters designed to warn people that walls have ears, paintings, and quotations from poetry from centuries ago.

Western society can no longer suffer, stay silent, and shrug off its heroics during and after another very big conflict, as the UK did during and after WW II. I will reread Marias' trilogy next year, to understand perhaps 70%, and then again, and again. Ultimately, this trilogy is about the Western world today, having become soft, silly, totally ignorant of its roots and fundamental ideas and values, which were fought for, again and again.

No one is safe viewed from such a perspective. Least of all Deza, who at the end of this tale, will have to remain on guard, sleep with one eye open.