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

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The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Deza's duties, when he finally starts working for the secret service, mainly involve translating and sharing his impressions of conversations and interrogations.

This last question is especially relevant, when you recognise that, even within the first part, there are different styles and subject matter. okuduğum hiçbir şeye benzemeyen kitapları okumaktan aldığım tadı hiçbir şeyden alamadım. belki almanlık... yani şakası bir tarafa, gerçekten okuduğum hiçbir şeye benzemiyor ve okurken bazı anlarda böyle şok etkisi yaratan, kafamda minik havaifişekler patlatan kitaplara ve onları yazan insanlara VE onları hakkıyla çevirebilen insanlara çok büyük hayranlık duyuyorum, hatta biraz da kıskanıyorum, ne yalan söyleyeyim. Por aquel entonces ya había comenzado a “cambiar de registro”, descubriendo nuevos tipos de literatura (nuevos para mí, quiero decir). En cierto modo era una especie de rebeldía adolescente, una forma de renegar de mis orígenes, aunque para ello tuviera que “traicionar” a mi autor más querido. Pero uno siempre vuelve a sus raíces y, tras leer recientemente Berta Isla y Así empieza lo malo, era el momento de sumergirme de nuevo en la inmensa Tu rostro mañana. 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. 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.

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But Marias then throws a rather hefty body blow to the reader who might be struggling with his complexity. "There is nothing worse than looking for a meaning or believing there is one." Deza says about two-thirds through. Not all that encouraging is it? 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 title comes from a comment half-way through made by Deza in an attempt to explain his father's betrayal. "How can I not know today your face tomorrow...?" he says. In other words: Isn't the real character of a person obvious long before he acts? Shouldn't one be able to see betrayal before any overt act to betray? One might assume therefore that this is the central theme that brings the four complex threads together. He wanted to hire my services, initially on an ad hoc basis and subsequently full-time, with theoretical duties as vague as they were varied, including acting as liaison or occasional interpreter on his Spanish or Latin-American incursions. It’s all in the voice, and if its peculiar intellectual negligees don’t draw you deeper into Marias’ cranial boudoir (for rather traditional pleasures after all is said and done), then you’re left out in the cold, a cold many readers would probably rather be in anyway, and that’s understandable. It’s all in the voice, and its saturating verbal power is reminiscent of Sebald, like an endless stream of voice straight into your ear, or in your face. And as with Sebald this voice is so seemingly natural and so personalized that fiction has the illusion (or is it?) of blending into nonfiction. But unlike Sebald Marias is a game player, a bit of a prankster, though that quality of his is at the service of an urgency in this book, the pranksterism manifesting in a rarefied detachment within some self-absorbed inner cosmos and an insistence on exhausting every topic raised, almost every seed of every idea planted in every statement, like the author had given himself a challenge; it’s almost Oulipian!

Kitabın başında sizi hiç bilmediğiniz bir şeye hazırladığı ilk birkaç bölüm hayatımda okuduğum en iyi girişlerden biriydi. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. It's unclear where the trilogy is going, but there's promise enough here to leave the reader eager for more. The most prominent other figure in the novel is Sir Peter Wheeler, a mentor of sorts to Deza, an Oxford Hispanist. Javier Marias'ın ustalık eseri denilen seriyi yazarla tanışma kitabı olarak seçmediğim için mutluyum çünkü yarım bırakabilirdim. Yazarın üslubuna alışkın olmak önemli. Kesinlikle sabır isteyen bir metin, yazarın okuduğum tüm kitapları öyleydi gerçi.As a result it was I think only on my 4th attempt that I did not abandon this book part way through - something that I almost never do with the 100 or so books I read a year. I should say that it took me a while to succumb to its charms. There isn't much of the instantly gratifying, high-gloss surface detail by which novels in the more empirical Anglo-American tradition ingratiate themselves with their readers. Nor is there much attempt to differentiate characters in terms of how they speak or think (odd, perhaps, in a book that consists largely of people talking or thinking out loud). And the ratio of action to abstract speculation feels rather low at times, especially in the first volume, where the ruminative passages often seem to expand more by repetition and tautology than the actual development of a thought. But as the work proceeds and the wonderfully macabre dramas begin to fill out the large intellectual frameworks, and all the recurring motifs – the mysterious drop of blood Deza finds at the top of a staircase, for example, or the notion he calls "narrative horror" whereby a famous life such as JFK's or Jayne Mansfield's is overshadowed by an infamous death – begin to release their implications, so one becomes increasingly aware of the book's immense boldness and originality. This novel is all diversion. Marías circles his subject not so much like a shark narrowing in on its prey as one hoping to conjure it out of thin water, and it is to the credit of the book that a fish, of some kind, seems to appear by the end." - Benjamin Markovits, Sunday Telegraph

BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves . Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward. 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. 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. 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. Its humour, too; aside from being one of the most poised and cultivated of fictional narrators, Jacques Deza is also one of the most amusing. His defiantly snobbish asides on the trashiness of our times are priceless, while the situations he finds himself in, however unpleasant, almost always have something farcical about them that keeps laughter in play along with horror.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).

Life is not recountable", Wheeler tells Deza, but the book focusses on these attempts to get at the crux of lives and people (something Deza appears to have a talent for). In this brilliant dark novel, Marías has taken a central philosophical concern and set it before us in a new light, at once magical and terrifying in its implications for what we most value: for love, for justice and for the belief that we are who we say we are, when we think we are being honest." - John Burnside, Scotland on SundayNo, 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." Ve benim de şaşırma sebebim tam da bu yokluk. Sadece uzun gözlemler – anlık çıkarımlar – söz sanatları ve karakterin gözleri olabilmek yetiyor bu eseri sevebilmek için. İlk sayfadan son sayfaya dek bir örgütün farkında oluyorsunuz, merakla bekliyorsunuz. Bu merak sizi sarıp sarmalıyor. Marias okurunu avucunun içine alıyor.. Al margen del protagonista, hay dos personajes en esta trilogía que son clave en el desarrollo de la historia y que, además, tienen muchas cosas en común. Ambos personajes están basados en personas reales —el padre del narrador en el padre del autor, el filósofo Julián Marías, y su protector en el Reino Unido, Peter Wheeler, en Sir Peter Russell, un buen amigo de Marías cuando este daba clases en Oxford. Ambos, cultos e inteligentes, afrontan el tramo final de sus vidas con la tranquilidad de quien ha hecho lo que tenía que hacer. Ambos representan una época ya casi extinguida, un tiempo de firmes principios (no necesariamente coincidentes), dignidad y capacidad de sacrificio. Ambos han vivido una guerra. Ambos, en definitiva, son un modelo a seguir para el narrador, en un mundo en el que ya no se puede ser como ellos. I can’t believe I’m talking about Marias like this. If you are a true Friend you will stop me. Right?