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Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear (New Directions Books) Paperback – September 17, 2007
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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.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew Directions
- Publication dateSeptember 17, 2007
- Dimensions5.2 x 1.2 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100811217272
- ISBN-13978-0811217279
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Editorial Reviews
Review
― 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]
About the Author
Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Javier Marías and José Saramago, lives in England.
Product details
- Publisher : New Directions; Reprint edition (September 17, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0811217272
- ISBN-13 : 978-0811217279
- Item Weight : 1.01 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 1.2 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,771,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #73,473 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.
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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."
The lack of paragraphs, the question as to subject and object, the straightforward sentences whose length causes you to forget subject before one comes across object... you get the gist? For those with stamina, or stubbornness, this is a rewarding work. If you hope for a traditional narrative, it is not. But if you want a work of art that in many ways reflects the oddities and slowness of life, then you should read this work. Disregard the noir surface if you can: I think it's only a hook for a much greater project, which is both Proustian and, admittedly, Procrustean. Life doesn't always fit, but Marias is trying to make it so.
Javier Marías takes us into a world of secret services, history, and literature. That involves the history of the Spanish civil war. Orwell more than Hemingway. His main protagonist and narrator is a translator and journalist, suitably called Jaime. For Jaime, this history is personal, it affected his father, who had been on the republican side and was betrayed to the victors by a friend. The story has autobiographical components.
This is volume one of a trilogy. The language (translated convincingly from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa) builds up some resistance, it is not easily accessible, but once an initial hurdle is conquered, it flows and delights, like in many James stories, where one needs to find the door first. Nothing seems to be lost in translation here. This is, after all, also the language of John le Carré.
The narrator has a valuable gift, which makes him an asset to his secretive employers. He is a kind of living polygraph. His high social/ emotional intelligence enables him to 'read' people and look through their hidden agendas. That is the meaning of the enigmatic title of the novel. What happened to his father could not have happened to Jaime. He would not have been clueless like his father. Presumably. The word `prescience' comes up.
Marías draws us into a complex story: the strange job for the government (the chapters about that have a tongue in cheek satirical touch: 'lack of definition was its essence'), and how it came about that the spooks hired him, and the unraveling of an ugly past.
'There is nothing worse than looking for a meaning or believing there is one. ... Believing that we do not owe ourselves entirely to the most erratic and forgetful, rambling and crazy of chances, ...'
A brilliant and entertaining novel, strongly recommended for Orwell fans. It also makes me interested in reading Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love. Jaime thinks that Fleming was a far better writer than lit history gives him credit for.
A final piece of wisdom: 'talking is probably the biggest waste of time among the population as a whole. It is wastage par excellence. Strangely, though, and despite everything, the majority continues to talk endlessly and every day'.








