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

Product Information

Once narrator Dezas starts his person-interpreting intelligence work in earnest the reader is confronted by a number of seemingly random descriptions of various persons unconnected to the larger narrative. The story is more about the little intelligence unit's ability to manufacture those profiles. It’s more about what the profiles say about the profilers. I believe the psychological term here is called “projection,” Freudian lingo that Marías never mentions. What are we led to think about the profilers by what they see in others? Remember, their work is all intuitive. They base their assumptions on nothing factual except the roughest biographical data. It’s a fascinating idea and it works though it makes for dense narrative. A beach read this is not. To fall silent, yes, silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves not even after death, and I least of all, for I have often told tales and even written reports, more than that, I look and I listen, although now I almost never ask questions. Not the easiest reading, but should find its fans among intrepid English-speakers undaunted by works in translation. Una y otra vez se cuestiona la palabra, su significado, las diferencias que en los mismos se da entre distintos idiomas, la relevancia de aquello que tiene su palabra en uno pero no en otro, el hecho de que tanto lo que decimos como lo que nos decimos está influenciado por el propio idioma elegido o solo puede ser bien expresado en él; una y otra vez Shakespeare , una y otra vez los mantras de la novela, “No debería uno contar nunca nada”, “Nada de lo que hubo se borra jamás del todo”, “Todo tiene su tiempo para ser creído”, “A veces resulta imposible explicar lo más decisivo”, “Hoy se detesta la certidumbre”, “Uno olvida mucho más lo que escribe que lo que lee, si le va dirigido; lo que envía que lo que recibe, lo que dice que lo que escucha, cuando agravia que cuando es ofendido”… 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.

Unlike The Man of Feeling the novel is lengthy and so Marias’s complex prose which often turns in on itself does cross over into being unreadable.It starts with a tremble in the stomach, a palpitation in the chest. You may call it intuition, premonition, foreboding. You may press it down with the firm fist of rationalism. And yet it persists, this flutter of feeling — this haunting sense that the future is not about to happen to you, but is already happening in you.

This begs the question: why write a review, when you have only finished 30% of the novel? How can you be sure that the first part is somehow representative or indicative of the whole, or the other parts? Sin embargo, Peter Wheeler eligió justo lo contrario; formar parte del misterioso grupo para el cual ha captado a Deza y ganarse la vida sabiendo, anticipando, adivinando el rostro mañana de cuantos pudieran, con un cambio de rostro, de lealtad o de comportamiento, suponer una amenaza o una oportunidad —una oportunidad, porque entre saber cómo reaccionará alguien ante un determinado estímulo y manipularle para controlar sus actos solo hay un breve paso.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. The narrator readily admits that he does not know much of what is going on. His is a process of continual discovery and analysis. Marías thereby embraces here that singular strength of the first-person narrator, unreliability. Though in Jacobo’s case it does not seem willful. In fact, there seems to be a forthright attempt to piece together what little he knows into a coherent whole. I found it enormous fun to follow his ideas as he stumbles on some dissonant fact or other and tries to reconsider how it might fit into the overarching puzzle before him. But the novel always remains just that: a fragment. This partial knowledge of course sets him up very neatly to be blindsided at some point further on. 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. Do you agree, or disagree with Andy? Come and let us know your thoughts on the Spybrary fans community. Your Face Tomorrow Fever And Spear by Javier Marias The third story is a mystery involving the disappearance of a (real) Spanish Communist and the assassination of Deza's uncle during the Spanish Civil War. These events are also linked to the unexplained betrayal of his father in Franco Spain. Much is made of the connection with the James Bond figure of Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love, in which book there appear to be significant references to at least the first event.