Your Face Tomorrow – Fever and Spear V 1 (New Directions Books)

Product Information

Marías began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga", one of the short stories in While the Women are Sleeping (2010), was written when he was just 14. He wrote his first novel, "Los dominios del lobo" (The Dominions of the Wolf), at age 17, after running away to Paris. All of which suggests, perhaps, a rather solemn, self-important book, whereas Your Face Tomorrow is in fact a work of sublime lunacy, closer in spirit to Sterne or Cervantes than some of the more modern mega-tomes – A la Recherche, for instance – to which it has been compared. (Musil might be more apt than Proust, with a dash of Anthony Powell to take care of its peculiar Englishness, but even that fails to do justice to the book's sheer waywardness.) Recounting seems a means for him to try, again, to understand some puzzling things, a way of trying to work things out.

It may be all that is left if one cannot trust anyone. Then, one cannot give oneself over to anyone or anything, a painting included. Gathering facts by those removed from self-intrusion either through will or an absence of self will theoretically lead to an assessment of who people are and who they will be in the future. Their face tomorrow. A little patience, in other words, is required of the reader, but it is amply rewarded. By the second volume all cylinders in its large and powerful engines are purring smoothly. And with this triumphant finale – the longest and best of all three – it becomes impossible to resist the thought that this deeply strange creation, with its utterly sui generis methods, its brilliant disquisitions on love and loss, its dark playfulness, may very well be the first authentic literary masterpiece of the 21st century.

Retailers:

In this way, it resembles Haruki Murakami's "1Q84", which could be (and was) published either as one volume or three separate volumes (although as far as I'm aware, Marias' novel hasn't been published in a single volume, other than in Spanish). Does it define the core themes of the novel as a whole? Does it merely introduce the characters? Does it anticipate aspects of the plot? bir kitap düşünün james bond hikayesi kadar aksiyonu varmış gibi yapıp size olup olmadığını anlatıcının dahi bilmediği şeyler(neyler) üzerinden bir şeyler anlatıyor olsun. kitapta aksiyon olmamasına rağmen kitabı soluksuz okutuyor, what kind of sorcery is this?!!

This is part 1 of his 3 volume Your Face Tomorrow – not a trilogy, mind you, but a single novel published in 3 parts. The voice throughout is the same, and in the novel the person behind the voice is recruited to serve in a peripheral way in British Intelligence, in league with spies and other covert operators. He is recruited because of his almost preternatural abilities of observation, in his skills of minutely observing people’s behaviors and determining what their inner intentions are, whether they’re lying, and what they’re hiding. So it bears some resemblance to a conventional spy yarn of international intrigue, but instead of focusing on the outer developments of a labyrinthine plot he goes inward to explore the nature of deceptions (both intentional and not) and the ways in which language, voice, is an accomplice (both intentionally and not) in these deceptions. There’s much more going on, such as investigations of personal relationships and the identities within these relationships, and how these deceptions and relationships play out in the larger arenas of societies at war with others and themselves, and within time as it unfolds, often negating itself in its own unfolding; but just with this little taste you should see that there are meta-hijinks at play, but serious hijinks. Kitabın başında sizi hiç bilmediğiniz bir şeye hazırladığı ilk birkaç bölüm hayatımda okuduğum en iyi girişlerden biriydi. Beneath Dance and Dream, one feels, is a medieval view of the world being subtly urged upon us, though it is in no sense religious. There remains in Jaime, right beside his taste for the lingerie of the 50s, a longing for courtliness, which, observed today, might save us from some of the worst aspects of ourselves. On the other hand, a knowledge of history makes Jaime grimly aware of the venality and violence rising to the surface of our lives now. And in this most beautifully tapped ancient vein of horror, Marías scales another peak, that of a deep, almost shamefully exciting lyricism of threat. Keeping an eye on that arch-enemy of his, who is about to snort coke in the "cripples' toilet" of a London nightclub, a place where violence of the fist or the gun might be expected, a sword, a huge menacing sword of the past, is produced: "It is the sword that caused most deaths throughout most centuries - it has killed at close quarters ... face to face with the person killed, without the murderer or the avenger or the avenged detaching himself from the sword while he wreaks his havoc and plunges it in and cuts and slices, all with the same blade which he never discards, but holds on to and grips even harder while he pierces, mutilates, skewers and even dismembers ... unlike something that can be thrown or hurled, the sword can strike again and stab repeatedly, over and over, again and again, each strike more vicious than the last ..." This is one of those books that makes me confused about my own literary tastes, which is something that I certainly appreciate. I think of myself as a girl who needs robust narrative and appreciates a certain down-to-earthiness in my novels, but I guess I'm not, or I wouldn't get into shit like this.Marías operated a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also wrote a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column "La Zona Fantasma" is published in the monthly magazine The Believer. So, again or independently, this dilemma begs the question: what is the function of the first book or part? Deza's duties, when he finally starts working for the secret service, mainly involve translating and sharing his impressions of conversations and interrogations. Deza and his elderly mentor Wheeler, both from Oxford, are working for British Intelligence, due to their uncanny ability to see within a person something closer to their essence by their tics of behavior and gesture. All is recorded without the perturbance of emotion. This is deemed a necessary attribute for the post war British spies of this clandestine unit. Possibly a detriment in social life, their life is their work. Little else exists beyond it. Our life is to read about them. While these sentences are made, uniformly and metaphorically, of water, they differ from each other as they strive toward their ultimate destination. So, again, it's not prudent to treat each segment of their journey as representative of the whole. A waterfall is materially or definitionally different from a stream, or a river.

Marías dissects most delicately the fine membranes that separate the arguably justifiable wars of the 20th century from the farragos in which we now find ourselves enmeshed, if only as the payers of tax and viewers of television. This is another thing that makes the one-to-one account of the atrocities known to Jaime's father the more humbling and chilling: though Jaime leads his life sceptical of any "fact", it dawns on him that recounting cannot really be stopped. No, I should not tell or hear anything, because I will never be able to prevent it from being repeated or used against me, to ruin me or - worse still - from being repeated and used against those I love, to condemn them." But telling is also a matter of trust, and he has his doubts that anyone can be trusted: confidences are almost inevitably betrayed.

Need Help?

Pero en realidad, más bien —en la práctica—, le interesé y me tomó como intérprete de vidas, según su expresión solemne y sus desmesuradas expectativas. Sería mejor dejarlo en traductor o intérprete de las personas: de sus conductas y reacciones, de sus inclinaciones y caracteres y sus capacidades de aguante; de su maleabilidad y su sumisión, de sus voluntades desmayadas o firmes, sus inconstancias, sus límites, sus inocencias, su falta de escrúpulos y su resistencia; de sus posibles grados de lealtad o vileza y sus calculables precios y sus venenos y sus tentaciones; y también de sus deducibles historias, no pasadas sino venideras, las que aún no habían ocurrido y podían por tanto impedirse. O bien podían fraguarse.