Last night I finished Javier Marías’s trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow. What has he done? He specifically invokes Ian Fleming and James Bond and so we can see how he has taken a Bond novel and written a work that fills in the genre’s “negative spaces,” to borrow from the visual world. This trilogy is a “spy novel” the way an abstract painting is always, first and foremost, a painting, and, second, the way it is somehow as well a painting of X, whereby X has been made absent and only non-X is now visible. Our narrator, Jaime, is a sort of spy with a British unit of M5 or M6, those details really don’t matter, sort of, and they float into an out of focus throughout the story. And what the novels do, mainly, is tell stories, collect a number of stories that ‘go with” the genre, loosely conceived according to what we now know to call a “tag cloud” (even though Marías composes his work on a typewriter and not a computer keyboard)—this tag cloud includes “spy novels, war stories, Spanish civil war, revenge, betrayal, protection, identity flux, narrative flux, narrative horror, death, aging, murder, bombing, WWII, Hitler, Nazis, Jews, camps, Göering, Himmler, racial definition, intelligence, propaganda, black game, wet game, white game, grey information, love, jealousy, adultery,” and we could go on a good while longer, for the novel is huge, and the tag cloud includes of course the helpful subtitle terms that guide our way through the labyrinth—fever, spear, dance, dream, poison and shadow. And of course Face and Yesterday and Tomorrow.
So single terms aside, how else encompass this work? If a normal spy novel/movie features action, especially these days, this novel inverts that by having very little happen in the usual way of action. It is all “Proustian” interior meditation, thinking, commenting, pondering, rationalizing, explaining, searching, all in the service of how best to tell the next great story in this private compendium of stories. There is no whiff of magic realism, of course, nor is there a wish to tell “the real truth,” to do the work of history as well as or better than history—or philosophy for that matter—either. I don’t know if the term “a novel of ideas” is used much these days, or “the literature of thought,” but both terms came to mind. Still, Marías is not out to compete with the philosophers either. God forbid. We all know his father was a distinguished philosopher in his day, for his generation. And in his day, Julian Marías was usually tagged as the best living disciple of the earlier great Spanish philosopher of the early 20th century—Ortega y Gasset. I remember being in Spain when I first saw a book written by Javier and I immediately asked—ah, is this perhaps one of Julian’s sons? Sure enough. And then skepticism pops up at once and says, Well, he got published because he is the son of the famous—-but is he any good in his own right? Novel after novel he has proven he is. Orhan Pamuk now says Marías should get the Nobel soon. Could a writer expect a better kudo?
But back to what he has done, is doing, in his work. I just discovered a few weeks back when Marías published a short story in our New Yorker magazine that it could easily be read as a re-working of two famous works by Robert Browning. And now that I’ve finished the trilogy I have this very much in mind—that Marías is much the contemporary —& here adding “Borgesian” to the mix is inevitable— bookish, literary writer, who quietly and playfully, with great seriousness of purpose, re-writes other literary works, or, rather, re-explores some of the potential left recently hidden in the evolution or history of the limited set of narrative forms available to any writer. Perhaps a future Marías novel will re-examine the sort of Romance novel written by men—some could say he has already done that in some ways. Or novels of passion. This is only an awkward and first-draft way of saying that Marías is steeped in literature and creates from within this living experience with it. Isn’t this what any writer does? To some extent, yes, of course. But Marías belongs to those contemporary writers for whom the play of allusiveness to other literary works becomes part of the living tissue of the story one is reading—-giving resonance to the experience a good deal like watching a Tarantino movie. Tarantino’s most recent movie is all about Nazis and so when I got near to the end of Marías’s novel and it too was about Nazi Germany, Tarantino’s movie came immediately to mind. Marías allows himself throughout the trilogy very few borrowings from or connections to Pop Culture, other than the Bond novels, but the few supremely well chosen links amplify the books with great shrewdness and delight. Movie historians will have a field day finding all the real and invented links Tarantino has planted in his movie—see especially the basement tavern scene in Germany where every nuance of every move the actors make and speak, every shading of brow, eye and finger surely comes from some German expressionist movie. And from other movies of the 30s and 40s. I don’t think Marías’s novel is quite that densely packed—but I may be quite wrong—-and now I am sure in fact that the whole trilogy is just as densely packed—even more so since words can reverberate more over time than images can—- and will feed many many dissertations on sources and influences and quotations and allusions.
If Marías becomes a great writer. Only time will tell, as all of his works tell us over and over and over, being profound remembrances reshaped out of Time, over against the destructive forces of Time. That old theme.
It is the pleasure of the experience of being in the story that we can never persuade someone else of—will your pleasure be as great as mine when you read this book? No one can know or guarantee that. Still, when crowds gather to buy the next work off the press or to see the writer appear in public and speak and read—-as Marías was just in New York and read at the 92nd street Y a few weeks back—-then we have the excitement of saying yes this time and yes again tomorrow. The dead novel has been resurrected once again. Literary experience lives. The doubling of consciousness when you are living inside a book for a while, lives and that keeps giving life to thee.
PS
In the second volume of the work Marías tells a story he heard from his father about life after Spain’s Civil War and the times of continuing betrayal and revenge that the survivors of his father’s generation lived through. (One of his father’s most successful books is called in English “Generations”—one element of that is that children more easily and readily can imagine the lives of their grandparents than they can the lives of their parents). In the third volume he tells stories he heard from Peter Russell, a British intelligence officer he met in England. I forgot to talk about how much the cross-cultural material is in the work—the narrator is Spanish but has worked and lived in England—and characters speak back and forth in both languages—not too much. This mainly shows up in pauses the narrator makes in his telling to note idioms in Spanish and idioms in English—and that way we get this flux between two rich cultures and histories. Here I thought of Beckett—-he “killed” his childhood Ireland by living in Paris and writing in French. Only then could he tell his great Irish tales and make them world tales, translating his own French back into his “reborn” English. Marías stays poised on the knife’s edge—-going back and forth from Spanish to English and making himself and us aware of it. There are wonderful meditations on Spanish and English phrases and on the possibility or impossibility of capturing them well in the other language. This is something Beckett did not want to do, maybe could not do, in the sense of his inner artistic process. Marías makes a substantial artistic achievement here alone by building these questions of translation into his work—-for all authors today know that their work probably will not gain universality or timelessness in their native language alone. I think of Haruki Murakami, for one. Is he perhaps the chief contender whom Marías must defeat for the Nobel? Or will they precede or follow one another?
PPS
Relatively speaking there is “no action” in volumes 1 & 2. So when there is action in Volume 3 it is all the more striking, horrifying, gruesome, troubling, disconcerting. It makes us reconsider, reevaluate everything we had come to believe and assume, about our narrator, about what he tells us, about how things connect, about all of it. The actions are straight out of the genre—the B-movie/novel about spies, terrorism, torture, fear and protection. The instruments are right out of any cheap novel or tales by Conrad, Kipling, Fleming and Hemingway–an old pistol, a rifle, spear, sword. Marías shamelessly brings in a cameo by a famous bullfighter, uses the cityscape of Francoist Madrid, even a well-known tourist souvenir shop across from the Prado. Oh, and in this volume Marías indulges himself in the use of pictures—surely permission granted (posthumously) by W. G. Sebald, to all authors everywhere. So we have paintings in the Prado and then, most brilliantly, posters from the two featured wars—the Spanish Civil and the World. Marías has tried—like many others now, more and more?—to take the greatest genre invented in the last century (maybe so) the cine noir and turned it upside down, inside out, backside front, expanded it, contracted it, lifted it from B to A, from sub-genre to art, art we see more and more as an art of paranoia, destabilization, disinformation, psychosis, sociopathology, unending war and everyday terror.
As it turns out, I am just finishing another novel that shares a good deal with Your Face Tomorrow in terms of the noir genre being reinvisioned and reinvented and that is Thomas Pynchon’s recent LA crime novel set in the 70s, Inherent Vice. More comments on this linkage after I have finished it.
by Witold Gombrowicz – It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the voice of this novel. I eat right up this kind of acidly ironic psychologizing (which, I think, is what appeals to me in Bernhard). Beyond the voice–which, I repeat, is outstanding–this book reminds me of a good play in terms of its taut structure. It more or less occurs in three “acts,” and the psychological riddles brought into play are both clearly stated and irresolvably complex. 
