Javier Marías is an Anglophile Spanish writer who has had a niche audience in the UK for a while now. Recently his work has attracted more notice, particularly his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow of which this is the concluding part.
This is by far the longest part of the work, and it has much more action than the other parts, although that’s not setting a terribly high bar, since very little happened at all in the first two parts. Marías is fond of the run-on sentence and at times his writing because almost Proustian, ambling as it does through multiple clauses before ending somewhere far removed from the sentence’s origin, and there is often page after page of parenthetical digression.
Many readers will find this habit difficult to take, especially since Marías is often not reporting events or speech of great import or profundity. But I find that the gradual accretion of detail, musings, asides, references and allusions starts to open up unexpected depths to the work. You could see what is immediately at the surface as rather pedestrian spy story, but what emerges from the style is a profound insight into the way people converse, think and act.
Marías can often spend page after page on something that seems fairly trivial. A good example of this is a huge digression that he embarks on within a few pages of the opening of the novel, much of which is taken up with an obsessive observation of a ladder in a colleague’s tights. By doing it this way, he mimics the way our minds flit between unconscious thought, private thought and public speech. Another idée fixe is a drop of blood the narrator found on the top step of an older friend’s staircase, a drop of blood that seemed ominous, and of which he doesn’t speak, which he cleaned up without further comment, although the rim of the blood droplet had dried and was particularly difficult to remove.
What’s remarkable is that Marías does this in a style that never approaches the difficulty of Joyce or Proust, say. The allusions are learned and wide-ranging, and the narrator’s musings are split between profound questions and every day thoughts that might occur to any one of his readers.
Marías is fascinated with language, and his narrator often compares a turn of phrase in English to its Spanish equivalent and vice versa, and it’s a remarkable feat by the translator Margaret Jull Costa that these sections make sense to the English reader. There are certain keywords that he obsesses over, none more than patria, the Spanish word for ‘fatherland’ that was hijacked by the fascists. It’s fascinating how a banal phrase like ‘my country’ uttered by an Englishman could mean something quite sinister to a Spaniard. (Interestingly, but unremarked by Marías, it was also appropriated by the Cuban communists for their slogan patria o muerte.)
About halfway through this volume, the action starts really picking up, with the narrator going back to his native Madrid for a couple of weeks. There’s an absolutely astonishing scene where he confronts his estranged wife’s new boyfriend, which in many ways is central to the entire project. Here, Marías’s technique is particularly effective, as a ten or fifteen minute period of real time is rendered as perhaps a hundred pages, while all the while we wonder what our narrator will do.
When I read the first part of the trilogy a few years ago I had my doubts about it, mainly because I found the disconnect between the literary technique and the rather banal events being described too great, but I think that was a mistake. I also found it rather humourless, but again that was mistaken; for example, there’s an amusing (and ironically hubristic) aside as the narrator tells us that the Godfather films were a masterwork (also a trilogy) that got better with each succeeding part.
This is not an easy book to read, but the effort required is not unreasonable and pays enormous dividends. Marías is a fascinating writer, and Your Face Tomorrow is one of the few modern books that fall outside the literary fiction template and break genuine new ground for the novel. It’s a series that I feel certain will be regarded as a masterpiece by future generations.
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