Los enamoramientos

Los enamoramientos (Alfaguara, 2011)
by Javier Marías
Spain, 2011

La última vez que vi a Miguel Desvern o Deverne fue también la última que lo vio su mujer, Luisa, lo cual no dejó de ser extraño y quizá injusto, ya que ella era eso, su mujer, y yo era en cambio una desconocida y jamás había cruzado con él una palabra.  Ni siquiera sabía su nombre, lo supe solo cuando ya era tarde, cuando apareció su foto en el periódico, apuñalado y medio descamisado y a punto de convertirse en un muerto, si es que no lo era ya para su propria conciencia ausente que nunca volvió a presentarse: lo ultimo de lo que se debío de dar cuenta fue de que lo acuchillaban por confusion y sin causa, es decir imbécilmente, y además una y otra vez, sin salvación, no una sola, con voluntad de suprimirlo del mundo y echarlo sin dilación de la tierra, allí y entonces.  Tarde para qué, me pregunto.  La verdad es que lo ignoro.

[The last time that I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife Luisa saw him, which didn't stop being strange and perhaps unjust since she was just that, his wife, and I on the other hand was a stranger and had never exchanged a word with him.  I hadn't even known his name, I only learned it when it was already late, when his photo appeared in the newspaper, stabbed and with his shirt half ripped off and on the verge of becoming a dead man, if, that is, he wasn't one already in terms of his own absent consciousness that would never again return: the last thing he must have realized is that they'd stabbed him to death by mistake and without any reason, that is to say idiotically, and what's more not just once but over and over again, without mercy, with the intention of eradicating him from the planet and throwing him off the face of the earth without delay, right then and there.  "Late for what?" I ask myself.  The truth is that I don't know.]

(Los enamoramientos, 11 [my translation])

As usual in a Javier Marías novel, the narrator's concise opening statement--this one courtesy of editorial assistant María Dolz, who will learn more about Miguel Deverne's untimely death than she ever could have expected or bargained for when Deverne was just half of the "perfect couple" that she used to see at a Madrid café each morning on her way to work--provides a perfectly convenient excuse for me to avoid bothering with any sort of a synopsis of the work and just dive right in.  Unlike other Marías novels, though, Los enamoramientos [literally, The Fallings in Love but appearing in English under the much less unwieldy title of The Infatuations as translated by Margaret Jull Costa] is perhaps the closest thing that the novelist has yet come to writing a detective story.  Of course, it helps if you can imagine that detective story as a metaphysical murder mystery full of minor chord ruminations on love, mortality, and yes, the act of falling in love--but one that also tussles with the nature of crimes of passion, literature's lessons about crimes of passion, and whether love makes some crimes of passion almost forgivable from an emotional if not necessarily a juridical point of view.  Heady, sometimes desperate stuff.  So what did I like best about Los enamoramientos? That's hard to say given that it's an arresting work which gives you an unusual amount of psychological richness to ponder.  Although all the usual Marías trademarks of sinuous prose, textured Shakespearean allusions, and intelligent conversations that take place in slow motion over multiple chapters of what seem like real but visibly dilated time are all here in abundance, I guess I particularly enjoyed the nifty intertextual use made of Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert that Marías revisited off and on throughout the novel: an affecting retelling of the story of a Napoleonic era military officer who came back from mistakenly being declared dead only to die a second death of sorts upon being rejected by his wife--who believed herself a widow and had remarried--and haunted by the moaning phantoms of the corpses he had almost been buried alive with on the battlefield at Eylau.  Macbeth and a scene from The Three Musketeers receive a similarly effective treatment. I was also impressed by the fact that, despite its multiple love stories and its moments of comic relief early on (many featuring the fictional portrayal of the real life professor Francisco Rico, who has become a great comic foil for his friend Marías), this disarmingly soulful "romance" also has enough range to take up Your Face Tomorrow's twin preoccupations of how easily loved ones can walk out of your life forever (or how easily loved ones can replace you with others) and how readily senseless crimes can be committed with impunity by ordinary people whose company you might otherwise enjoy.  It's a disturbing but very thought-provoking read in that regard--especially when you consider that not only Deverne's existence but even the memory of him begin to be blotted out by the living upon his death as evidenced by so casual a thing as the confusion over the spelling of his name.  Finally, it wouldn't be a Marías novel without any number of memorable dialogue passages to read and reread and savor some more.  Since the ones I'd most like to pull from are way too long for these purposes, I hope you'll settle for this super short one that links Colonel Chabert's near fate as a presumed dead man, heaped up naked in a common grave full of cadavers according to the custom of the times, with Miguel Deverne's, stabbed to death on the streets of Madrid leaving a widow and two children behind:  "Había sido un vivo ilustre, pero ahora es sólo un muerto en medio del frío y todos van al mismo sitio" ["He had been an illustrious man alive, but now he's just a dead man in the middle of the cold and everybody goes to the same place"] (156).

 Javier Marías

The Infatuations is now out in the U.K. and is scheduled to make its U.S. appearance on Knopf in August but with one of the dumbest excuses for a book cover I've ever seen.  A white dress shirt?  Really?

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico (New Directions, 2010)
by Javier Marías [translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen]
Spain, 1998

It prob. wouldn't have felt like a real Spanish Lit Month to me without a Javier Marías work or two to talk about, and although I eventually decided to pass on pre-tournament favorites Negra espalda del tiempo [Dark Back of Time] and Los enamoramientos for sheer lack of time, the 57-page Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico [original title: Mala índole] wasn't a bad consolation prize at all.  In fact, I laughed my way through most of this quick, amusing read even though I, uh, kind of felt like I was cheating on Marías by reading him in English.  In any event, the set-up of Bad Nature is as follows: contrary to the official story passed down by history to the effect that the King never actually set foot in Mexico while shooting all of Fun in Acapulco from a Hollywood soundstage, Elvis fan and Madrid native Ruibérriz de Torres (real first name unknown but presumably the very same ghostwriter Ruibérriz who figured in Marías' 1994 Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí) narrates a story dating back to the time he was in Mexico accompanying "EP" on the set of this very same movie.  Through a series of translation-based misunderstandings and a choice but maybe poorly-timed insult from Elvis himself, poor Ruibérriz--or Roy Berry as the Spanish-challenged gringos in Elvis' inner circle take to calling him--finds himself being hunted down by a pack of Mexican thugs who aren't particularly fond of the fast-talking Spaniard's "European accent" (43).  Marías, who probably isn't appreciated enough for his comedic chops, is in particularly fine form here: "'Oh, no, please, what will his father think,' Ruibérriz wonders as the man he calls Mr. Presley "perpetrated 'And the Bullfighter Was a Lady' wearing some approximation of a Mexican rancher's garb and swirling a bullfighter's cape over his carefully coiffed head or throwing it around his shoulders with the yellow side up as if it were a cloak."  And a moment later: "'Oh, no, that's going too far, that's regicide,' I thought when I read in the screenplay that in the final scene Presley was to sing 'Guadalajara,' in Spanish, at the edge of a cliff, cheered on insincerely by all the mariachis together.  But that's another story, and the linguistic disaster was no fault of mine" (19-20).  In other words, atypical Marías but--as far as I know--the best Elvis- or El Vez- or even "Mucho, Elvis"-related tale yet to make an appearance during Spanish Lit Month.  It's a hit! (New Directions) 

Tu rostro mañana. 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós

Tu rostro mañana.  3 Veneno y sombra y adiós (Debolsillo, 2010)
por Javier Marías
España, 2007

La pregunta del día hiza por el lector desinteresado: ¿es que Javier Marías realmente necesitó todas las 1.332 páginas de Tu rostro mañana para contar la historia?  A lo que yo diría: sí, ¿Marías no podía compartir al menos 200 páginas más?  Me encantó la experiencia de leer este libro y en sumergirme en el brillo de sus digressiones narrativas hasta el punto de que sufrí una versión libresca de la depresión postparto cuando llegué al fin.  Qué librazo.  Sin querer revelar demasiado, digamos que el Veneno y sombra y adiós del tercer y último volumen se enfrenta con al menos tres temas grandes--nuestra incapacidad para verdaderamente conocer la gente en el círculo más interior de familiares y amigos íntimos; la fuerza imprevisiblemente transformacional de la violencia, incluso cuando aplicada a las "causas justas" como la llamada guerra sobre el terrorismo y la lucha contra el fascismo en la Segunda Guerra Mundial; y, finalmente, nuestra incapacidad para saber cómo nosotros mismos reaccionaríamos frente al trauma o a la pérdida o al mal en el futuro--mientras que evita dando respuestas superficiales y se narra por medio de monólogos interiores, la narracón tradicional, y más monólogos interiores de manera hipnótica.  Dado que mis compañeros Amateur Reader y Rise ya han escrito sobre la confiabilidad o la falta de confiabilidad del parlanchín Jacques Deza como un narrador y de cómo Tu rostro mañana se sitúa dentro de las obras completas de Marías, voy a limitarme a mencionar tres cosas sin orden ni concierto que se destacaron para mí en el volumen final de esta híbrida idiosincrática de novela de espionaje y historia sentimental.  Primero, para un texto que es esencialmente una elegía en prosa, me gustó el efecto de claroscuro ocasionado por el humor alegre de Marías.  ¿Esa escena donde el saco de arena humano y patán De la Garza pone a prueba su talento como un cantante de rap a la embajada española en Londres frente al famoso especialista del Siglo de Oro Francisco Rico?  ¡Un clásico de la comedia!  En segundo lugar, ¿qué puedo decir sobre la maestría de Marías en cuanto a la creación de personajes de carne y hueso además de don Francisco Rico?  Dentro de una obra en cual dos atentados brutales tienen lugar en primer plano, en cual Deza tiene que mirar el equivalente a snuff films grabadas en vídeo desde la guerra sobre el terrorismo, y en cual recuerdos perturbadores sobre las peores infamias de la lucha contra Franco y Hitler más y más son el centro de atención, un par de mis escenas preferidas tuvieron que ver con los momentos calladas y sutíles donde una mano sobre el hombro del padre de Deza y la ausencia de una mano sobre el hombro de su amigo Wheeler explican todo sobre el cariño que el narrador tiene por estos dos hombres que están acercando a la muerte.  Una escritura con alma, te digo.  Por último, nunca me cansé de pasar tiempo con Deza y los otros personajes y sus historias inacabables. Me gustaron sus pensamientos, sus anécdotas, y el estilo de narración (como un trance) donde todo empezaría con una conversación, seguiría con un recuerdo, continuaría con una escena retrospectiva, y etcétera hasta que el hilo origina reaparecería  párrafos, páginas, e incluso capítulos enteros más tarde.  En resumen, la única queja que tengo en lo que refiere a esta novela es que se acabó tan temprano.  Eso se remedia leyendo el nuevo Los enamoramientos en el mes que viene. (www.debolsillo.com)

Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (New Directions, 2011)
by Javier Marías [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]
Spain, 2007

The casual reader might well wonder: did Javier Marías really need 1,332 pages to tell Your Face Tomorrow?  To which I might casually reply: I agree, couldn't he have given us just a couple of hundred pages more?  Loved, loved, loved reading this thing in all its digressional glory, to the point that I actually went into a bit of a funk after finally finishing it.  What a fantastic book.  Without wanting to give too much away, let's say that Volume 3's Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes on at least three big ticket items--our inability to truly know those closest to us, be they loved ones or dear friends; the unpredictably transformative power of violence, even when applied to a "good cause" as in the so-called war on terror or in the fight against fascism in World War II; and, finally, our inability to predict how we ourselves will respond to trauma or loss or evil when put to the test--all while avoiding easy answers and seamlessly transitioning from interior monologue to narrative and back again in a tour de force of real time narration.  Since fellow readalongers Amateur Reader and Rise have already written insightfully snazzy posts on the voluble Jacques Deza's reliability or unreliability as a narrator and how Your Face Tomorrow fits into Marías' larger body of work, I'm going to limit my comments here to three rather random things that grabbed me about the final installment of this idiosyncratic spy novel/love story. First, for a text that's essentially an elegy in prose, I loved the chiaroscuro effect produced by Marías' playful sense of humor.  That scene where loudmouthed beating victim/boor De la Garza tries his rap act out on real life Siglo de Oro expert Francisco Rico in the Spanish embassy in London?  A comedy classic!  Secondly, what can I say about Marías' range as a creator of flesh and blood characters not named Francisco Rico?  In a work in which two brutal assaults presented in close-up, videotaped equivalents of snuff films from the war on terror, and disturbing memories of the worst infamies of a world at war against Franco and Hitler increasingly take center stage in the theater that's the narrator's mind, a couple of my favorite moments had to do with the quiet, understated backstage scenes where a touch on the shoulder of his father and the lack of a touch on the shoulder on his friend Wheeler say more about the depth of Deza's feelings for these two dying men than I'm usually privileged to witness in fiction.  A very soulful piece of writing.  Finally, I never tired of spending time with Deza or any of the other characters as their stories spilled out seemingly endlessly.  Enjoyed all their thoughts, their anecdotes, and that trance-like narrative style in which a conversation would lead to a memory, a memory to a flashback, and on and on until the original point of departure would resurface paragraphs, pages, and even entire chapters later.  In short, the only real complaint that I have about this work is that it wasn't long enough for me.  Hope to remedy that with a reading of Marías' new Los enamoramientos next month.  (www.ndpublishing.com)

Javier Marías

Epilogue/Lost in Translation

Thanks to everybody who participated in the readalong and/or otherwise commented along the way.  I loved the novel, had a great time reading all your posts on the work, and look forward to adding all the other readalong posts here sometime soon.  Please note that in looking at the Margaret Jull Costa translation for Vol. 3 of Your Face Tomorrow (in the Chatto & Windus British hardback), I noticed that the epilogue material that's included in my Spanish edition is missing from the British one.  Amateur Reader has confirmed that the epilogue is also missing from the MJC-translated U.S. New Directions edition as well.  So what are you missing?  The Epílogo in the Debolsillo paperback I read has a 5-page addendum signed off by Javier Marías called "Los intérpretes de vidas" [literally: "The Interpreters or Translators of Lives"] in which Marías revisits the theme of careless talk and the work of the Tupra and Wheeler group and their translations of people's lives over the years.  I read it as a kind of standard but interesting postscript, but I probably should read it again.  The really fun stuff comes in what follows, though: three three-to-five page reports on well-known celebrities that alternate between hilarity and viciousness.  These include "Informe de Pérez-Nuix sobre Silvio Berlusconi (2002)" ["Pérez-Nuix's Report on Silvio Berlusconi (2002)"], "Informe de Rendel sobre Michael Caine (2002)" ["Rendel's Report on Michael Caine (2002)"], and "Informe de Tupra sobre Diana de Gales" (1996)" ["Tupra's Report on Diana of Wales (1996)"].  Anyone want to take a guess on the only celeb who receives a flattering "interpretation"?

Otros informes

Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations) #1

Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations) #2

Frances (Nonsuch Book)

Nicole (bibliographing)

Nicole (bibliographing) #2

Rise (in lieu of a field guide)

Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño

Tu rostro mañana.  2 Baile y sueño  (Debolsillo, 2010)
by Javier Marías
Spain, 2004

Javier Marías is such a gifted novelist that my greedy reading self is already beginning to lament the fact that there's only one volume left in Tu rostro mañana [Your Face Tomorrow] after Baile y sueño [Dance and Dream].  Couldn't this be a neverending story instead?  In volume 2 of this three-part, post-war on terror "spy saga," the savage beating of a near defenseless man in a nightclub restroom, administered by Tupra and witnessed by Deza, and the long-suppressed story of two Spanish Civil War atrocities, related to Deza by his father after years of keeping quiet on the matter, serve to foreground an increasing preoccupation with violence and victimization on the narrator's part.  Where this will lead to is anybody's guess at this point, but the theme is treated in such an unfailingly believable way that the disquieting ending--Tupra's defense of the Kray twins-style manipulation of fear in others and his wish to justify the use of violence to Deza by historical precedents dating back to the fall of Constantinople in 1453--seems to hint that the end justifies the means morality of the spy business and a shadowy new associate described as having the "pinta...de mafioso romano--quiero decir vaticano" (67) ["look of a Roman--or, rather, Vatican--mafioso" (49, in Margaret Jull Costa's translation)] may end up traumatizing poor Deza just as much as the failed marriage that he'd obviously like to piece back together if his estranged wife would only permit it.  That being said, it's the writing and the depth of the emotions brought to the surface by the narrative more than the unexpected plot developments that continue to wow me as time moves on--a lot of this due to Deza as narrator.  For whether skewering Berlusconi's Italy as the land of "brutales autoridades xenófobas pseudolombardas, aún más lerdas y soeces que las pseudomadrileñas despreciativas nuestras" (31) ["brutal, xenophobic, pseudo-Lombardic authorities, who are even coarser and more oafish than our own contemptuous, pseudo-madrileño ones" (13-14)], sharing a tender memory about separated wife Luisa's amused and genial laugh, or in recounting the extended speech by his father on the horrors of real life as opposed to fictive violence (see fragment below), Deza is one of the most recognizably human characters I've run into all year.  What do I mean by that?  I actually care about his fate--to the point that I'm a tiny bit concerned that Deza, like the singer in "Streets of Laredo" who figures in one of the more left field digressions in this digression-heavy novel, may already be a dead man walking (emotionally, ethically or otherwise) whose narrative is being brought to us borne aloft on the slipstream of fictional mortality.  In other words, way looking forward to volume 3's Veneno y sombra y adiós [Poison, Shadow, and Farewell].  (www.debolsillo.com)

Javier Marías

Deza's Father, Deza, and Cervantes

'Pero mira si han variado las cosas, y las actitudes: cuando se le declaró la Guerra a Hitler, y quizá no ha habido ocasión en que se hiciera más necesaria y justificable una guerra, el propio Churchill escribió al respecto que el mero hecho de haberse llegado a aquel punto y a aquel fracaso convertía a los responsables, por honrosos que fueran sus motivos, en culpables ante la Historia.  Se estaba refiriendo al Gobierno de su país y al de Francia, entiendes, y por extensión a sí mismo, aunque él bien habría querido que esa culpa y ese fracaso los hubieran alcanzado antes, cuando la situación no les era tan adversa ni habría sido tan cruento y grave librar esa posible guerra.  "En esta amarga historia de juicios erróneos efectuados por personas capaces y bienintencionadas...", así dijo.  Y ahora, ya ves, los mismos que se escandalizan por los batacazos de Tom y Jerry y de sus descendientes desatan guerras innecesarias, interesadas, sin ningún motivo honroso, evitando otros recursos si es que no torpedeándolos.  Y a diferencia de Churchill, ni siquiera se averguüenzan de ellas.  Ni siquiera las deploran.  Ni por supuesto se disculpan, hoy no existe eso en el mundo...  En nuestro país fueron ya los franquistas, los que crearon esa escuela.  Jamás se ha disculpado ni uno, y también ellos desencadenaron una guerra innecesaria.  La peor posible.  Eso sí, con la colaboración inmediata de muchos de sus contrincantes...  Qué exageración fue todo...'  Ahora noté que mi padre pensaba en voz alta, más que hablarme, y seguramente eran pensamientos que venía teniendo desde 1936 y quién sabía si a diario, de la misma o parecida manera en que no hay día o noche en que no se le representen a uno en algún instante la idea o la imagen de los muertos más próximos, por mucho que pase el tiempo desde que se despidió uno de ellos, o ellos de uno: 'Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo, y deseando veros presto contentos en la otra vida'.

(Tu rostro mañana.  2 Baile y sueño, 281-282)

'But look how things have changed, and attitudes too: when war was declared on Hitler, and it may be that there has never been an occasion when a war was more necessary or more justifiable, Churchill himself wrote that the mere fact of having come to that pass, to that state of failure, made those responsible, however honourable their motives, blameworthy before History.  He was referring to the governments of his own country and of France, you understand, and, by extension, to himself, although he would have preferred that state of blameworthiness and failure to have been reached at a much earlier stage, when the situation was less disadvantageous to them and when it would not have been so difficult or so bloody to fight that war.  "...this sad tale of wrong judgements formed by well-meaning and capable people...": that is how he described it.  And now, as you see, the same people who are scandalised by the rough and tumble of Tom and Jerry et al. unleash unnecessary, selfish wars, devoid of any honourable motives, and which sidestep all the other options, if they don't actually torpedo them.  And unlike Churchill, they are not even ashamed of them.  They're not even sorry.  Nor, of course, do they apologise, people just don't do that nowadays...  In Spain, the Francoists established that particular school of thought long ago.  They have never apologised, not one of them, and they, too, unleashed a totally unnecessary war.  The worst of all possible wars.  And with the immediate collaboration of many of their opponents...  It was absurd, all of it.'  I realised that now my father was thinking out loud, rather than talking to me, and these were doubtless thoughts he had been having since 1936 and, who knows, possibly every day, in much the same way as not a day or a night passes without our imagining at some point the idea or the image of our dearest dead ones, however much time has passed since we said goodbye to them or they to us: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.'

(Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 2: Dance and Dream [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]: New Directions, 2008, 276-277)

More

Nicole (bibliographing)

Tu rostro mañana. 1 Fiebre y lanza

Tu rostro mañana.  1 Fiebre y lanza (Debolsillo, 2010)
por Javier Marías
España, 2002

"¡Qué deshonra es para mí recordar tu nombre!  ¡O conocer tu rostro mañana!"

Shakespeare, Enrique IV, II, 2

Jacques Deza, recién regresado a Inglaterra después de pasar unos años en su España natal y separarse de su mujer, aprovecha de sus lazos con los alumni oxonienses para conseguir empleo con lo que parece ser un ramo del servicio secreto británico.  Salvo una o dos alusiones a Desde Rusia con amor, lo que sigue no tiene nada que ver con la novela de espionaje típica quizás esperada por algunos.  En lugar de eso, el ex profesor Deza (el narrador sin nombre de Todas las almas, de Marías, y aquí llamado o Jack o Jaime o Jacobo o Diego según el que habla y las circunstancias) lanza una interesantísima meditación introspectiva sobre las consecuencias de contar y de callar y, más especifícamente, la fuerza de palabras para traicionar a nosotros y a los demás: una meditación hiza más concreta a causa de los recuerdos de varios personajes acerca de la Guerra Civil Española y el bombardeo alemán de Gran Bretaña en los cuarenta en el pasado y la sombra del ataque contra las Torres Gemelas en el presente.  Como podía esperarse luego de leer las otras novelas impresionantes de Marías en este año, dos de los grandes placeres que se pueden encontrar dentro de Fiebre y lanza son ver el estilo a cámara lenta que él ha perfeccionado (Marías sobre Tristram Shandy, una obra traducida por él hace años: "Una de las cosas que aprendí de él es la utilización del tiempo, descubrí que un minuto puede durar ochenta páginas") y mirar el dominio del lenguaje del novelista como ofrece nuevas percepiones psicológicas con gran frecuencia a lo largo de la obra.  Aunque no voy a compartir la excelente frase larguísima de tres páginas que me rendió completamente paralizado de asombro (véase las páginas 50-53 de esta edición), lo siguiente es un muy buen ejemplo de cómo, a pesar de los asuntos de espionaje con Sr Tupra y la amistad con Sir Peter Wheeler y a pesar de los paralelos entre el padre del narrador dentro de la novela y el padre de Marías mismo en la realidad (ambos fueron encarcelados por los fascistas a causa de las mentiras de delatores en los primeros años de Franco), la sección Fiebre y lanza de la historia de Deza es una suerte de memento mori que está marcado por el amor y la pérdida del amor y los pensamientos del personaje en cuanto al fracaso de su matrimonio:

Quién sabe quién nos sustituye, sólo sabemos que se nos sustituye siempre, en todas las ocasiones y en todas las circunstancias y en cualquier desempeño, en el amor, la amistad, en el empleo y en la influencia, en la dominación, y en el odio que también acaba por cansarse de nosotros; en las casas en que habitamos y en las ciudades que nos consienten, en los teléfonos que nos persuaden o nos escuchan pacientes con la risa al oído o con un murmullo de asentimiento, en el juego y en el negocio, en las tiendas y en los despachos, en el paisaje infantil que creíamos sólo nuestro y en las agotadas calles de tanto ver marchitarse, en los restaurantes y en los paseos y en nuestras butacas y en nuestras sábanas, hasta que no queda olor en ellas ni ningún vestigio y se rasgan para hacer tiras o paños, y en nuestros besos se nos sustituye y se cierran al besar los ojos, en los recuerdos y en los pensamientos y en las ensoñaciones y en todas partes, sólo soy como nieve sobre los hombros, resbaladiza y mansa, y la nieve siempre para... (48)

Ese pasaje, mis amigos, ¿ese último pasaje arriba?  Me mata.  (www.debolsillo.com)

Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 1: Fever and Spear  (New Directions, 2007)
by Javier Marías [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]
Spain, 2002

"What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, to know thy face tomorrow..."

Shakespeare, Henry IV, II, 2

Jacques Deza, back in England after several years away and a failed marriage in his native Spain, takes advantage of his old Oxford connections to land a job with what seems to be a shadow branch of the British secret service.  Give or take a sly From Russia with Love allusion or two, what follows has absolutely nothing to do with the typical spy novel that might be expected.  Instead, the former academic Deza (the unnamed narrator in Marías' earlier All Souls and here variously referred to as Jack or Jaime or Jacobo or Diego depending on the speaker and the circumstances) launches into an absorbing, introspective reflection on the consequences of the acts of telling and not telling and, more specifically, the power of words to betray us and others--a reflection made more tangible by various characters' recollections of events dating back to the Spanish Civil War and the Blitz and references to the Twin Towers attacks in the present.  As is only to be expected from the other impressive Marías novels I've read this year, two of the principal pleasures to be found in reading Fever and Spear are watching events unfold in the deliberate slow motion style that he's practically made his own (Marías on Tristram Shandy, which he translated into Spanish years ago: "One of the things I learned from it was the use of time; I discovered that one minute could last eighty pages") and beholding the novelist's extremely precise use of language while routinely offering up astute psychological insights that get under your skin.  While I'll have to spare you a sample of the awesome three-page long sentence that had me giddily transfixed when I tried to isolate a favorite quote from it for this post (see pages 33-36 if at all interested), here's a shorter passage that will give you another really good example of how, despite the spy business with Mr. Tupra or the warm friendship with Sir Peter Wheeler and despite the parallels between the narrator's father within the book and Marías' own father outside of it (both served time in fascist prisons in Franco's Spain on account of informers' lies), the Fever and Spear portion of Deza's story is a sort of memento mori haunted by love and loss and the intimations of mortality suggested by an everyday occurrence as unexceptional as thinking about the aftermath of his own broken marriage:

Who knows who will replace us, all we know is that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in whatever we do, in love and friendship, as regards work, influence, domination, even hatred, which also wearies of us in the end; in the houses we live in and in the cities that receive us, in the telephones that persuade or patiently listen to us, laughing into our ear or murmuring agreement, at play and at work, in shops and offices, in the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and in the streets exhausted from seeing so much decay, in restaurants and along avenues and in our armchairs and between our sheets, until no trace of our smell remains, and they are torn up to make strips or rags, even our kisses are replaced, and they close their eyes as they kiss, in memories and in thoughts and in daydreams and everywhere, I am like the snow on someone's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops..." (31, translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

That, my friends, that passage right there?  Just slays me.  (www.ndpublishing.com)

Javier Marías

 Más
Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations) + pt. 2
C.B. James (Ready When You Are, C.B.)
Frances (Nonsuch Book)
Nicole (bibliographing)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

Your Face Tomorrow Group Read

(New Directions: English translation by Margaret Jull Costa)

In a departure from the usual truculent book you've never heard about/book you probably wouldn't want to read/book you've never heard about but probably wouldn't want to read anyway review format around here (the "you" in question not being regular Caravana readers, of course, but those homogeneity-loving bloggers more inclined to favor a weekly meme/review of a book I'd never want to read/weekly meme posting format on their own blogs), I thought I'd take a moment to mention the three-month long Javier Marías Your Face Tomorrow [Tu rostro mañana] group read some intrepid friends and I will be undertaking in June through August this summer.  Marías' novel, the subject of a previous readalong at Conversational Reading last year which drew raves for the book (host Scott Esposito: "It's a testament to Marías' abilities as a storyteller that after 1,000 pages of this book Volume 3 has me more hooked than ever"), is probably one of the most important works in Spanish language literature of the last 10 years judging by its reception by the critics.  At the same time, its reception has been such that even people who have embraced its ambition and prose have questioned its overall success as a genre-bending work of art (Stacey d'Erasmo, writing in the NY Times, called it a "magnificent, sui generis three-part novel" but a project that was "both fundamentally troubling and fundamentally troubled").  Care to put these mixed reviews to the test yourself? If so, please join us for one or more of the following dates below (to encourage the participation of fellow procrastinators, I've arranged the discussion schedule for each volume of the novel to fall on or near the last day of each month).

• Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 1: Fever and Spear (Thursday, June 30th)
• Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 2: Dance and Dream (Sunday, July 31st)
• Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Wednesday, August 31st)

(Debolsillo: Spanish original by Javier Marías)

Probable participants for one or all volumes

Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations)

C.B. James (Ready When You Are, C.B.)

E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)

Frances (Nonsuch Book)

Rise (in lieu of a field guide)

Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

Stu (Winstonsdad's Blog)

P.S.

It's been an absolutely awesome week for Spanish language literature in these parts.  First, Amateur Reader over at Wuthering Expectations has been running a superb week-long series on "The Spanish Issue" of The Hudson Review, which features essays by Bolaño, Borges, and Antonio Muñoz Molina among others in addition to poetry and other stuff.  The Bolaño essay, "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" on the subject of Argentinean literature, is prob. the best critical piece I've read all year and typically Bolañoesque in its mixture of entertainment, insight and savage delivery.  Secondly, I've just started Enrique Vila-Matas' El mal de Montano [Montano's Malady], which I've been looking forward to ever since I read his amusing Bartleby y compañia [Bartleby & Co.] a few years back.  Finally, in addition to ordering the first volume of Javier Marías' Tu rostro mañana pictured above for the upcoming group read, I picked up several Spanish language titles that I'd been craving for a while in a Thursday night jackpot at Schoenhof's: César Aira's Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter], Roberto Bolaño's nonfiction Entre paréntesis [Between Parentheses, forthcoming in English translation in June, and the source of "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" excerpted by The Hudson Review] and unfinished novel Los sinsabores del verdadero policía [a January 2011 release with no translation date set yet, this features a grab bag of writing about various characters from 2666 and other Bolaño titles], and Javier Cercas' Anatomía de un instante [The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History & Imagination].  Not sure when I'll get around to all this booty, but it has already caused a shake-up in my reading plans for the rest of the month.  Exciting times, for me at least!

Todas las almas

Todas las almas (Debolsillo, 2009)
by Javier Marías
Spain, 1989

Having now been wowed by two Javier Marías novels in a row, presently waiting for another title of his to arrive in the mail, and ever more eagerly looking forward to a three month long Tu rostro mañana [Your Face Tomorrow] group read with Frances and others this summer, I hope you, my longsuffering public, are prepared for the steady diet of Marías and Proust posts that I have in store for you here this year.  If not, don't slam the door on your way out!  Todas las almas [All Souls], like the achingly beautiful Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí [Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me] that would follow it five years later, begins with the sort of emotional bombshell of an intro which Marías seems partial to and which a lesser writer just couldn't pull off: "Dos de los tres han muerto desde que me fui de Oxford, y eso me hace pensar, supersticiosamente, que quizá esperaron a que yo llegara y consumiera mi tiempo allí para darme ocasión de conocerlos y para que ahora pueda hablar de ellos.  Puede, por tanto, que --siempre supersticiosamente-- esté obligado a hablar de ellos" (17) ["Of the three, two have died since I left Oxford and the superstitious thought occurs to me that they were perhaps just waiting for me to arrive and live out my time there in order to give me the chance to know them and, now, to speak about them.  In other words--and this is equally superstitious--I may be under an obligation to speak about them"] (3, as translated by Margaret Jull Costa).  However, not only does the rest of the novel measure up to the challenge presented by this "obligation"  mentioned at the beginning but it even exceeds expectations with the unnamed Spanish narrator's elegiac account of his two turbulent years as a foreign don at Oxford--a span of time in which the weight of long-repressed secrets and the trauma of memory among his small circle of friends and acquaintances will make the character worry that he's more connected to the world of the dead than the world of the living.  While this summary is bound to make the novel sound like more of a downer than it actually is, suffice it to say that All Souls is often quite humorous in its depiction of Oxford life and always graced by that wry observational style of Marías' that makes him seem like a distant descendent of Proust or something.  Maybe not as "deep" or as wrenching as Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me but way more than arresting and involving enough to have me lusting after the remainder of Marías' back catalogue.  All of it, that is.  (http://www.debolsillo.com/)

I read Marías in the handsome Spanish edition pictured up top.  An English translation by Margaret Jull Costa was published by New Directions in 2000 in a slightly less garish cover than usual for that publishing house.

Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí

Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Debolsillo, 2009)
por Javier Marías
España, 1994

"Nadie piensa nunca que pueda ir a encontrarse con una muerta entre los brazos y que ya no verá más su rostro cuyo nombre recuerda.  Nadie piensa nunca que nadie vaya a morir en el momento más inadecuado a pesar de que eso sucede todo el tiempo, y creemos que nadie que no esté previsto habrá de morir junto a nosotros" (15).  Así comienza Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, una novela cuya meditación sobre el azar y las bifurcaciones metafísicas se centra en lo que pasa al escritor Víctor Francés después de la noche en que la casada Marta Téllez muere en los brazos del hombre justo antes de consumar el adulterio.  "Ay Dios, y el niño", Marta lamenta al final, dejando atrás el protagonista y el niño de dos años en la casa y el marido afuera del país en un viaje de negocios (46).   Aunque Marías toma este principio trágico y eventualmente se lo convierte en algo aún más devastador con respecto a la tensión psicológica, su estilo lento --cerca de Proust y Sebald en su énfasis sobre la interioridad, la digresión, y la intersección del tiempo y de la memoria y totalmente lleno de párrafos de cinco páginas y más-- a veces pide un poco de paciencia al lector.  Después de un rato, me encantó.  Como corresponde a una obra donde el narrador es un esritor profesional (la ironía: es un negro o un escritor fantasma), la escritura es pulida e hermosa.  Como corresponde a una obra en cual la relación entre los vivos y los muertos es un centro de atención, el narrador comparte no sólo sus propios monólogos interiores sino los de los otros personajes como imaginados por él.  Aunque el libro por cierto tiene sus momentos de humor, lo que más me impactó en sus páginas fue la capacidad de Marías para evocar almas en pena sin ser cursi en el proceso.  No habiendo leído nada del novelista desde El hombre sentimental hace años, supongo que ahora tendré que leer todos los tres tomos de su elogiado Tu rostro mañana antes del fin del año.  Mientras tanto, qué buen libro es éste y qué melancólico también.  "Y mientras tanto un día más, qué desventura, un día más, qué suerte.  Sólo entonces dejaré de ser el hilo de la continuidad, el hilo de seda sin guía, cuando mi voluntad se retire cansada y ya no quiera querer ni quiera nada, y no sea 'aún no, aún no' sino 'no puedo más' lo que prevalezca, cuando me interrumpa y transite sólo por el revés del tiempo, o por su negra espalda donde no habrá escrúpulo ni error ni esfuerzo" (305). (http://www.debolsillo.com/)

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (New Directions, 2001)
by Javier Marías [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]
Spain, 1994

"No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember.  No one ever expects anybody to die at the least opportune of moments, even though this happens all the time, nor does it ever occur to us that someone entirely unforeseen might die beside us" (3).  So begins Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, a novel whose meditation on chance and the metaphysical forks in the road of life commences with the events that befall writer Victor Francés on the night in which the married Marta Téllez dies in his arms right before the two were about to have sex.  "Oh God, the child" Marta laments as she expires, leaving the protagonist alone in the house with her two year old while her husband is out of the country on a business trip (32).  Although Marías eventually turns this tragic beginning into something even more sobering in terms of the psychological tension on display, his glacial style--replete with paragraphs five pages and more in length and somewhere between Proust and Sebald in terms of its emphasis on interiority, digression, and the intersection between time and memory--may initially demand some patience on the reader's part.  I grew to love it myself.  As befits a work where the narrator's a professional writer (irony: a ghostwriter at that), the writing is beautiful, polished, worked.  As befits a work in which the relationship of the living and the dead is one of the main focuses of attention, the narrator shares not only his own interior monologues but also those of the other characters as imagined by him.  Although the book does have its humorous moments, what most got to me here was Marías' capacity to evoke souls in pain without being cheesy about it in the process.  Not having read anything else by the novelist other than El hombre sentimental [The Man of Feeling] several years ago, I suppose I'll now have to read all three volumes of his heavily hyped Your Face Tomorrow before the end of the year.  In the meantime, what a fine, achingly beautiful effort this is.  "And meanwhile, another day, how dreadful, another day, how fortunate.  Only then will I cease to be the thread of continuity, the silken thread without a guide, when my weary will grows tired and withdraws and no longer wants to want or wants anything, and when what prevails is no longer 'not yet, not yet' but 'I can't take any more of this,' when I interrupt myself and I travel along the reverse side of time, or along its dark back where there will be no room for scruples or error or effort" (271).  (http://www.ndpublishing.com/)

Javier Marías

Tantas cosas suceden sin que nadie se entere ni las recuerde.  De casi nada hay registro, los pensamientos y movimientos fugaces, los planes y los deseos, la duda secreta, las ensoñaciones, la crueldad y el insulto, las palabras dichas y oídas y luego negadas o malentendidas o tergiversadas, las promesas hechas y no tenidas en cuenta, ni siquiera por aquellos a quienes se hicieron, todo se olvida o prescribe, cuanto se hace a solas y no se anota y también casi todo lo que no es solitario sino en compañía, cuán poco va quedando de cada individuo, de qué poco hay constancia, y de ese poco que queda tanto se calla, y de lo que no se calla se recuerda después tan sólo una mínima parte, y durante poco tiempo, la memoria individual no se transmite ni interesa al que la recibe, que forja y tiene la suya propio.
(Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, 69-70)
*
So many things happen without anyone realizing or remembering.  There is almost no record of anything, fleeting thoughts and actions, plans and desires, secret doubts, fantasies, acts of cruelty and insults, words said and heard and later denied or misunderstood or distorted, promises made and then overlooked, even by those to whom they were made, everything is forgotten or invalidated, whatever is done alone or not written down, along with everything that is done not alone but in company, how little remains of each individual, how little trace remains of anything, and how much of that little is never talked about and, afterwards, one remembers only a tiny fraction of what was said, and then only briefly, the individual memory is not passed on and is, anyway, of no interest to the person receiving it, who is busy forging his or her own memories.
(Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me [translated by Margaret Jull Costa], 54)