Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - Hardcover

Marías, Javier

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081121656X ISBN 13: 9780811216562

Publisher: New Directions, 2006

Synopsis

A book unlike any other, a daring experiential unfolding Spanish masterpiece, Your Face Tomorrow now leaps into uncharted new territory in Volume Two: Dance and Dream.

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marias's dazzling unfolding magnum opus, is a novel in three parts, which began with Volume One: Fever and Spear. Described as a "brilliant dark novel" (Scotland on Sunday), the book now takes a wild swerve in its new volume. Skillfully constructed around a central perplexing and mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, Volume Two: Dance and Dream again features Jacques Deza. In Volume One he was hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception. In Volume Two Deza discovers the dark side of his new employer when Tupra, his spy-master boss, brings out a sword and uses it in a way that appalls Deza: You can't just go around hurting and killing people like that. Why not? asks Tupra.

Searching meditations on favors and jealousy, knowledge and the deep human desire not to know, violence and death play against memories of the Spanish Civil War as Deza's world becomes increasingly murky.

About this title

About the Author

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

MARGARET JULL COSTA is a three-time winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. For New Directions, she has translated works by Rafael Chirbes, Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, and Enrique Vila-Matas.

From Publishers Weekly

The spy story is incidental to acclaimed Spanish novelist Marías's elegant but prolix second volume of a projected trilogy (after Fever and Spear) narrated by Jacques (or Jaime) Deza, a Spanish expat in London and former Oxford instructor working as an analyst for the intelligence service MI5. Deza's inscrutable, nihilistic handler, Bertram Tupra, doesn't clarify Deza's mission when he brings him to a nightclub to accompany the wife of a contact. There, Tupra terrorizes and beats a man for hitting on the wrong woman. Though this central action unfolds at length, Marías's real concern-evidenced by the dense but not always incisive philosophizing that makes up this mostly internal novel-is the process of reflection rather than the ideas themselves. Like Marías, Deza is an accomplished translator, keenly aware of the imprecision of language; his inner monologues sprawl and fold back in on themselves. In the novel's most compelling section, though, Deza recounts his father's recollections of the Spanish Civil War, which revealed the capacity of ordinary people to commit and then disassociate themselves from extraordinary brutality. With the elder Deza's voice, Marías demonstrates his adroitness at narrative, which makes the rest of the digressive novel all the more frustrating.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 081121656X
• ISBN 13: 9780811216562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288