Your Face Tomorrow – Fever and Spear V 1 (New Directions Books)

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The narrator readily admits that he does not know much of what is going on. His is a process of continual discovery and analysis. Marías thereby embraces here that singular strength of the first-person narrator, unreliability. Though in Jacobo’s case it does not seem willful. In fact, there seems to be a forthright attempt to piece together what little he knows into a coherent whole. I found it enormous fun to follow his ideas as he stumbles on some dissonant fact or other and tries to reconsider how it might fit into the overarching puzzle before him. But the novel always remains just that: a fragment. This partial knowledge of course sets him up very neatly to be blindsided at some point further on. This begs the question: why write a review, when you have only finished 30% of the novel? How can you be sure that the first part is somehow representative or indicative of the whole, or the other parts?

Javier Marias ile böyle görkemli bir tanışmayı hayal etmiyordum. Evet seveceğimden emindim ancak bu denlisini beklemiyordum. Öncelikle söylenmesi gereken şey şu: Bir başlangıç, bir son, bol olay var sanıyorsanız; yanılıyorsunuz. It may be all that is left if one cannot trust anyone. Then, one cannot give oneself over to anyone or anything, a painting included. Gathering facts by those removed from self-intrusion either through will or an absence of self will theoretically lead to an assessment of who people are and who they will be in the future. Their face tomorrow.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. Cuando se publicó Fiebre y lanza, el primer volumen de la trilogía, yo ya había leído, y releído, todo lo que Marías había publicado anteriormente, incluidos infinidad de artículos. Además, el narrador de Tu rostro mañana era en muchos sentidos un alter ego del autor, no solo por su biografía sino por muchos rasgos de su carácter. En suma, estaba un poco saturado de Marías. Wordy and in no rush to move ahead, Fever and Spear isn't your typical spy-thriller, but what there is is tantalizing enough.

A lengthy section late in the novel focusses on the campaign in the Second World War against "careless talk" in Britain, where everyone was warned against revealing any information that might be of use to the enemy -- because you never knew who might be the enemy. siz izleniyor ve dinleniliyorsunuz. Farkında bile olmaksızın hem de.. Sizi dinleyen yakınlarınız da olabilir, sizi izleyen komşunuz da..While these sentences are made, uniformly and metaphorically, of water, they differ from each other as they strive toward their ultimate destination. So, again, it's not prudent to treat each segment of their journey as representative of the whole. A waterfall is materially or definitionally different from a stream, or a river. 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 Once narrator Dezas starts his person-interpreting intelligence work in earnest the reader is confronted by a number of seemingly random descriptions of various persons unconnected to the larger narrative. The story is more about the little intelligence unit's ability to manufacture those profiles. It’s more about what the profiles say about the profilers. I believe the psychological term here is called “projection,” Freudian lingo that Marías never mentions. What are we led to think about the profilers by what they see in others? Remember, their work is all intuitive. They base their assumptions on nothing factual except the roughest biographical data. It’s a fascinating idea and it works though it makes for dense narrative. A beach read this is not. Dense, acrobatic stream-of-consciousness exploring the political and personal ramifications of the violation of a confidence, by Spanish novelist Marias ( The Man of Feeling, 2003, etc.). 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.

A cliffhanger ending -- an unidentified woman comes to visit Deza in the middle of the night --- also leaves the reader even more curious as to: what next ?) This last question is especially relevant, when you recognise that, even within the first part, there are different styles and subject matter.Does it define the core themes of the novel as a whole? Does it merely introduce the characters? Does it anticipate aspects of the plot? In the past he has studied literature and taught Spanish literature at Oxford, and his contemporary peers have been Professors of Spanish or English Literature there (Peter Wheeler and Toby Rylands, the latter now deceased).

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. Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed, rare is the close bond that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end, become so tangled that a razor or knife is needed to cut it.

Also at the dinner is Bertram Tupra, for whom Deza eventually goes to work (having passed the test). I'll pause my review there, until I read at least the second part, if not the third part of the novel (which I've now done). Ateş ve Mızrak alt başlıklı ilk ciltte Tüm Ruhlar'ın isimsiz baş karakteri, Jacques Deza olarak daha yaşlı ve eşinden ayrılmış bir adam olarak Londra'ya geri dönüyor. Deza BBC'de çalışırken yine Tüm Ruhlar kitabından aşina olduğumuz Peter Wheeler sayesinde bir istihbarat grubu için çalışmaya başlıyor. Buradaki görevi işvereninin istediği kişilerin karakterlerini gözlemlemek ve analiz etmek. Hatta bundan fazlasını yapıyor Deza, insanların gelecekteki davranışlarını tahmin etmeye çalışıyor.