The first volume of a novel-in-three-parts, Your Face Tomorrow, 1: Fever and Spear is Javier Marias’ meditations on the dangers of telling someone something; that even if words as creations are creative, they have a destructive potential that could lead to a person’s death, or even a whole nation’s downfall. The paradox, of course, is that we are being told not to “tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories.” What are the dangers then that our narrator, Jacques Deza, had to face by this betrayal of his very own warning?
This is then a novel about how much people keep, even to themselves. It is about masks, and lies, and imaginings, that sometimes become truths in order for people to get the things they wanted, or believed they wanted. For in this world even our wants could be made-up. But: “the hardest part about fictions is not creating, but maintaining them, because, left to their own devices, they tend to fall apart.” And so the hardness of politics and the ambivalence of literature would get mixed-up. Deza might be reading a book on history and yet fictive characters would populate his allusions. We thought we were reading a novel and then we would be presented with pictures and posters and facsimile of documents that might exist in reality.
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This is also, naturally, about language, what it could and could not say, the language as fountains of our truths and our lies. This is about what one language finds difficult to say from another language–concepts, ideas, experiences. Deza, a Spanish from Madrid who now lives in London, recognizes how his own shifts in language–between Spanish & English–also trigger recognitions of what is home. Even if he could use both languages fluently (like many other bilinguals), only one of them could he really call his own. People may be able to use several languages, but they can only ever own one.
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Time here moves slowly (unlike in detective or mystery novels, “to which Wheeler, like all people of a speculative or philosophical bent, was quietly addicted,” or in an adventure novel such as Fleming’s From Russia with Love, which was quoted heavily in this novel), because people are immersed in thinking and talking, mostly about what happened during the war–a past that Deza didn’t share with his mentor Wheeler–and how people like Deza, the ones prescient, were recruited to help assess people, to understand what people would be capable of doing, to know what their face tomorrow would be, because “perhaps the future has more influence and imposes more obligations on us than the past, the unknown more than the already known.” Marias here critiques how easily we could pass judgment on people and yet how difficult it was for us to understand ourselves. And so persecutions happened, and continue to happen, both in the left and in the government, and in our very own conflicted lives.
Filed under: 1001 Lists & Beyond Tagged: 1001 Books You Must Read, Javier Marías
