Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (Vol. 2)
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spy story is incidental to acclaimed Spanish novelist Mar as'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, Mar as'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 Mar as, 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, Mar as demonstrates his adroitness at narrative, which makes the rest of the digressive novel all the more frustrating.
