Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811217272
• ISBN13: 9780811217279
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A mind in overdrive

Spaniard Jaime/Jacobo/Jack/Jacques Deza ("interpreter of people, translator of lives") works for Bertram Putra's secretive and unnamed agency in London in a building with no name. He is a person with a mind in continuous overdrive, assessing, analysing, speculating and associating. Part 1 of the trilogy ended with a cliff hanger, with Deza being followed at night walking home. Part 2 provides a partial answer: the pursuer's identity is disclosed, also the request made to Deza, and Deza's compliance. But not why he does so. This book is a superb study about the concept of fear and how to instil it, with real time and historical examples, such as horrific events during the Spanish civil war and the terror inflicted by the criminal, sword-wielding Kray twins in London in the 1960s. It gathers weight and speed in the second half, when Deza accompanies his boss to a nightclub for an important meeting during which Deza has to keep the wife of Tupra's contact happy, pleased with herself. What happens next is truly superior descriptive writing about fear and its application and provides the reader with two cliff hangers: Tupra decides Deza is still too naive for his own good, has his priorities wrong and drives him to his own home for further instruction. Before that, Tupra asked/ordered Deza to accompany him on a foreign mission. In Part Three, Deza is going to be shown the facts of life, one way or the other. Part 1 and 2 provide a backdrop for a dramatic and resounding finale in Part 3. Will Deza be welcomed back by his wife in Madrid? Will the mystery about the bloodstain on spy master Wheeler's staircase be solved conclusively? Etc., etc. On the rebound from Part 1, I reread a few early novels by John Le Carre, the best writer on espionage. They hark back to the early 1960s. They proved to be timeless and fantastic entertainment. Marias' spy trilogy has been subordinated to lots of other ideas and memories and concerns and ambitions. He is longwinded and not as accessible as Le Carre, many of whose books require, after all, careful reading. There are occasional nasty asides in Part 2: I share his distaste for Berlusconi, but why do women wearing berets deserve to be shot? Spanish readers may see more ultra-swift, one sentence-long character murders in this volume. The plots thickens, the tension mounts. Volume 3, after all, equals the two introductory books in size and weight.

I'm hooked

I can't believe I'll have to wait at least two years for the third volume. Just like Fever and Spear, the sequel ended in a crescendo of questions, flashbacks, cliffhangers and teases. Marias is an author that takes some getting used to but once you do, once you stop thinking about what happens next and simply take in each of the anecdotes and flashbacks and slowly-revealed plot points as they come, you will be hooked. If you haven't read Marias before, I would recommend starting with his short novel, The Man of Feeling, or with the short stories. Come back later for Your Face Tomorrow because it is definitely a masterpiece.

Proustian, with exquisite and frequently humorous developments

This translated work has the narrator attending a cocktail party thrown by a tweedy, elderly gentleman Oxford don. After some amusing scenes, their friendship is explored and each narrates long histories regarding the Spanish Civil War, life in England, etc. Then the narrator is asked to take on work of studying people, videos, etc, for his observations. The vague spymaster tone, with many references to Kim Philby and various leftists in Spain, is one theme of this novel. Another is the narrator's long passages where he makes the kind of brilliantly mundane, but brilliantly subtle, observations about people and life. For example, a scene where the narrator stays at the don's house and late at night, finds and cleans up a small bloddstain at the top of the stairs. The scene, on the surface extremely mundane, goes on and on as the author spins in much wisdoom and asides that are quite captivating. Also, several (many) times there are translations between English and Spanish that the narrator comments quite amusingly on, how a certain phrase or other has a uniqueness that is very unexpected and interesting to consider. This is also in general a very amusing book, surprisngly. The author knows how to be comic when it's called for, and several characters are purely for comic relief. Also, the narrator's tone always has a witty undertone to it, making the dialogue and comments he makes crackle with appeal. My only problem is that the printing of this book, the pages, are to small. The text is essentially many unbroken paragraphs, and with a large typeface set onto small-than-average page size, it makes for a daunting visual. Better is to use a larger page, with small typeface, whereby the text can be approached as a whole and sunk into, rather than as a too-bold stream. Clearly, this is literary fiction of the highest quality, doen superbly and it is amazing to read in its depth and sheer richness.

How much we can trust each other?

This is the first novel by Javier Marias i have read. The rythm is slow, enough to review a tragic episode from the Spanish Civil war and make philosophy of our trust/distrust behaviors. The framework of the civil war and the second world war memories puts these behaviors under the disappointing review of Mr. Wheeler, a former british spy, and in the present of the fiction professor at Oxford university and friend of Jacques Deza (the alter ego of Marias in the novel, and the voice in off).Javier Marias makes me remember the stories written by Jorge Luis Borges. The story, the characters, the facts, are only instruments, temporal (and atractive, and suitable) vehicles to send a message. The entire novel is only a messenger. And the message is a bunch of questions, historical facts, Javier Marías personal insights, and very interesting things about language and feelings, that every reader should "translate", on his/her personal memories, silences, and fears.It is not a happy story. And you won't finish the book with terrific feelings about people and their deeds. But i think it is a good story to be aware about the recent history of our modern trust on institutions and people, and how vulnerable we could be if we don't see reality, just see it, plainly, instead of using the glasses of fantasy, illusion, and foolishness. And this what i take to me from this long story: our vulnerability towards our fantasies and illusions, and our resistance to see plainly, with no prejudices, reality around us, and in the hearts of the people we met.A great thought provoking novel.