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Tu Rostro Mañana (2000)

by Javier Marías(Favorite Author)

4.52 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Fiction

series

Your Face Tomorrow

review 1: Oh what a long strange poisonous fever dream it's been, oh what a shadowy dance with death (and war and violence). And still is, because it's like my head's all foggy and I'm having trouble gathering my thoughts. It's as if they're caught in Marías's intricate web of interrupted stories and conversations, citations (and self-citations) and repetitions.The fact that it took my a while to finish the book doesn't help either. In fact, it took me a really long time to finish the trilogy as a whole, for several reasons. First, my copy of the 1st volume was faulty (entire pages missing). So I had to wait for a replacement copy to arrive in Brussels (much thanks go to Einaudi for that!); second, the paperback version of the 3rd volume was just coming out as I finished the 2nd vo... morelume, so I first waited for its release, then vainlywaited for a delivery from an online Italian bookstore (it never came [1]), before placing a second order with amazon [2]; and thirdly, I took my own sweet time in reading the 3rd volume. I'm not sure I can say why: Marías fatigue perhaps? (though in this case I read other books between the volumes; see my review of _Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me_); half-paralyzed in that aforementioned web? or poisoned into numbness by Tupra's philosophy? (Most likely all of the above.)Let's start with the beginning, where Tupra begins to inject us with his poison (which isn't his of course, but the "world's"). Before he begins to show Deza the violent videos, he says (this is the first line of the book), "We don't want it, but we always prefer that the person beside us die [rather than ourselves]..." [3] So right away we're kinda taken aback. Really? Are humans really that mean? Tupra admits that there are exceptions of course, but that in general "that's the way of the world". If the ship's sinking, every man for himself. Deep down, we're violent and uncaring. And so how does Deza finally answer Tupra's question? Why can't we go around hitting and killing people? (which was Deza's objection to Tupra's behavior in the club) "Because no one could live." (page 164) [4] And how does the book answer that question? It doesn't, not directly. Everyone has their own way of dealing with the way of the world, everyone sees their responsibilities differently. But the book's title keeps reminding us that even if today we won't do a certain thing, who can say about tomorrow? In the end, I think the real answer is: it depends; every situation calls for a way to handle that situation, the trick is knowing how to know it...We could spend all day discussing the themes in this book: violence and fear, war and peace, memory and pain, death and time, the impossibility of knowing not only others but perhaps even ourselves. (Not to mention my favorite: "narrative horror", that is, our morbid attachment to our own story.)We could spend all day discussing Marías's style [5], the literary and artistic citations that mark our way (the way), marveling at how he manages to haunt us despite our desire to be annoyed by (possibly even to scream at) his repetitions and interruptions, the unorthodox way he creates suspense, right up until the final paragraph.But in the end, it's the story of a man -- a man who didn't even want to know himself -- who perhaps begins to know himself, a man who starts to see that words/stories/actions have consequences far beyond what we can even imagine...[1] Not naming any names, but at least I was reimbursed.[2] Say what you will about amazon, at least they get stuff to you...[3] My translation from the Italian translation.[4] Which I suppose is only true if everyone went around hitting and killing people. The fact that only a minority do, makes it simply "the way of the world".[5] Compared with his other books, this is the one (the trilogy as a whole) that seems the most "planned out".
review 2: There's a select group of novels in my reading history: the first time I read them, I would occasionally become deeply envious of people who hadn't started them, because that meant they had something amazing to look forward to. The first time it happened was with War & Peace. It also happened with The Magic Mountain, Gravity's Rainbow (although I was sick when I read it, so it might have just been a fever), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Gerard Woodward's sort of memoir trilogy. That's not to say all of these books are equally good, and certainly not that they have much in common. Anyway, I got that feeling with this volume of Your Face Tomorrow. Like many of the above books, it'll probably take three or four reads before I really have any idea what this is even about, but my best guess so far is: 20th century 'total' warfare leads us to be suspicious of language and thought. Thanks to this suspicion, and a possible cultural decline, we are decreasingly able to use these things properly, and those who are able to use them properly often end up using them for pretty obviously evil or self-interested acts. This gets very self-reflexive for a novelist, particularly one like Marias who (accurately) believes that he can use language and thought well. In the hands of a lesser man or woman, the book would end up feeling like a novelist's lament for the art of the novel, in which the real world is little more than a tool used to talk about books. With Marias, though, we're given a book which reminds us that novelists are people too; like the rest of us, they're concerned with ideas and thoughts and knowing other people. Instead of being another navel-gazing disquisition on the impossibility of modernist literature in a post-modern world, then, we get a book about what it's like to *live* in a world that makes it difficult to take important things - including, but not limited to modernist literature - seriously. But just by *being* one of those important things, Your Face Tomorrow reminds us that we can be serious people. Also, Maria Jull Costa is the best translator I know. Amazing work. less

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