Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever And Spear

Javier Marías

Editions

Review

This book is the first volume of a novel that might be described as an exploration into the difficulty of knowing another person.  The territory will be familiar to readers who know Marías’s previous work.  Jacques Deza is a Spanish intellectual who has moved to London after his divorce.  Action – of a peculiarly Maríasian nature - takes place at a dinner party given by Sir Peter Wheeler, a retired don and semi-spy, in Oxford.  It continues afterwards on the stairs on the way to bed, and at breakfast the following morning.  At one point, Deza finds a drop of blood.

The real action takes place deep between the lines of his labyrinthine, circuitous sentences.  Deza, it seems, has been recruited to an informal organization that may or may not be connected to MI6.  At any rate, he has been identified as possessing an unusual talent for seeing into people and guessing how they will behave from their appearance.  As he tells us about one or two of his new commissions, he also analyses his marriage and some of the betrayals of the Spanish Civil War.

This is probably not the place to start reading Marías because it does not have the surface events to be found in All Souls pbk £7.99, A Heart So White pbk £6.99 or Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me pbk £8.99.  There is a sense here of cutting to the chase – the cerebral chase.  But it is brilliant.

From my review in the Spectator - review by John de Falbe

John Sandoe [Books] Ltd
10 Blacklands Terrace, Chelsea, London SW3 2SR
Tel: 020 7589 9473 Fax: 020 7581 2084
sales@johnsandoe.com