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the complete review - fiction

Your Face Tomorrow
1. Fever and Spear

by
Javier Marías

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : intriguing, but doesn't get very far (yet ?)

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus -- some think it's great, some don't take to it at all

  From the Reviews:

• "Jetzt sucht Marías seine Souveränität darin, daß er fast ganz auf Handlung verzichtet. Mit der Konsequenz, daß die Gedanken nun oft wie private Versponnenheiten wirken, weil ihnen die Anschauung und Exemplifizierung fehlen. (...) Aber aufs Ganze gesehen wird die Lektüre zur Enttäuschung, nachdem man bis zur Mitte des Buches mit großen, aber aufgeschobenen Erwartungen weitergelesen hat." - Wolfgang Schneider, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Although Marias sincerely champions Ian Fleming here, his own writing is a powerful antidote to the plot-addled, quick-payback product so dominant in British publishing. Marias, often described as Anglophile, is in fact fascinated with the leavings of British life -- maverick writers like John Gawsworth, who flared brightly before dying destitute. He's also acute on British manners. (...) Marias is one of the best minds in fiction today. His is an experiential kind of writing, a thinking on the page, unlike anything else now. In Your Face Tomorrow, it produces another work of urgent originality." - Guy Mannes-Abbott, The Independent
  
  
• "Discursive yet focused, expository yet oblique, Marías's style is like nothing any English writer has produced. He has a gift for the wickedly comic set-piece, but he slips so effortlessly between tones and registers that these sit side-by-side with passages of the most chilling heartlessness. And just as he seems incapable of writing a thoughtless or throwaway sentence, so Margaret Jull Costa earns her place in translator's heaven with a seamless and subtle rendering of what must be nightmarishly difficult Spanish prose." - Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "It's a lumpy, unblended mixture of Marías's well-known biography, personal gripes about society (better expressed in his journalism for the Sunday supplement of El País), and historical or literary concerns, with fictional ingredients that look thin or preposterous by comparison." - Lorna Scott Fox, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Der Gedanke als Klang: Marias ist ein Virtuose dieses Klangs, und zwar ein derart vollendeter, dass der Roman den Wunsch nach Handlung gar nicht erst aufkommen lässt. Dein Gesicht morgen ist ein wunderbares "livre sur rien", ist betörende Wortkunst, die den Leser nicht mehr loslässt. Verwaist und an den Rand gedrängt findet sich hier die Story." - Kersten Knipp, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "The overall effect recalls the cerebral play of Borges, the dark humor of Pynchon, and the meditative lyricism of Proust." - Pedro Ponce, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "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 Sunday
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "(F)or the most part this is an intriguing and audacious experiment (dexterously translated by Margaret Jull Costa) in turning language back on itself as its own untrustworthy betrayer. I look forward to the next volume." - John Spurling, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Ultimately, everything in this hauntingly singular book hangs on the author's ability to provoke trains of new thought through meticulous passages of fluent, sophisticated reflection. To some, it will seem slow and impenetrable; others will see its tireless tracing of one man's thought processes as further evidence that Javier Marías is well on the road to Stockholm." - Martin Beagles, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Es ist anämisch. Er hat wunderbare Gedanken -- etwa über die verstreichende Zeit, das Alter --, aber er pappt sie farblosen Sprechpuppen an. Es gibt in diesem knapp 500-Seiten-Roman nicht einen einzigen Menschen, dem er Leben einhaucht; selbst der Erzähler, ein in London lebender Spanier, anfangs Akademiker, dann in nebulöser Agentensphäre tätig, bleibt so blass wie uninteressant. (...) Was hier vorliegt, ist kein geformtes Kunstwerk. Es ist ein Kaleidoskop beliebiger Splitter, sie fügen sich bei einer Drehung zu einem aparten Bild, bei der nächsten Drehung fallen sie scheppernd auseinander. Scherben allemal." - Fritz J. Raddatz, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Fever and Spear is the first part of a planned trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow (the second part is already available in Spanish, the third is -- at this time -- still in the works), It is narrated by a Spaniard named Jaime Deza (also called Jacobo, Jacques, Jack, etc.), who has led a varied career, as teacher, publisher, translator, and who, when the novel begins, works for BBC Radio in London. Divided into two parts -- yes, Fever and Spear -- this first volume of the trilogy basically covers how Deza is recruited by a British intelligence service outfit and then some of the work he does for that organisation.
       The most prominent other figure in the novel is Sir Peter Wheeler, a mentor of sorts to Deza, an Oxford Hispanist. Wheeler invites Deza to his home, and a dinner party there becomes -- as Deza only realises later -- a sort of test, to see whether Deza has the observational powers and instincts required for the secret service work they'd like him to do. Also at the dinner is Bertram Tupra, for whom Deza eventually goes to work (having passed the test).
       Fever and Spear isn't much of a cloak and dagger novel. Deza's duties, when he finally starts working for the secret service, mainly involve translating and sharing his impressions of conversations and interrogations. There's little menace or sense of danger -- and what there is (Deza's impression that he is being followed, for example) remains, for now, fairly harmless. Among the most intriguing secrets are those surrounding the Spanish Civil War (and Wheeler's role there), a long-past conflict that, like World War II, still overshadows the present of these characters.
       Fever and Spear is a meditative novel, with Deza (and also Wheeler) extemporising at considerable length on matters such as trust and silence and the dangers of any communication. Deza begins his account with the observation (or warning ?):

     One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion.

     (Keeping silent, erasing, suppressing, cancelling and having, in the past, remained silent too: that is the world's great, unachievable ambition

Many learned to say things without really saying them, and became accustomed to that.

How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it ?

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Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Penguin publicity page
• Alfaguara publicity page
• Klett-Cotta publicity page
• Interview in The Observer
• Article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)

• Barcelona Review (Spanish)
• bibliographing
• Book's End
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• Matthew Gallaway
• Globe and Mail
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• n+1
• Publishers Weekly
• Thinking Blue Guitars
• 3 Quarks Daily

• Javier Marias -- official site
• Profile at The Guardian
• Profile in The New Yorker

• Bad Nature
• Berta Isla
• Dark Back of Time
• The Infatuations
• The Man of Feeling
• Thus Bad Begins
• To Begin at the Beginning
• Tomás Nevinson
• When I Was Mortal
• While the Women are Sleeping
• Written Lives

• Gareth J. Wood's Javier Marías's Debt to Translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov

• See Index of Spanish literature under review

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About the Author:

       Spanish author Javier Marías lived 1951 to 2022.

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© 2005-2023 the complete review

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