Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell by Javier Marías; trans. by Margaret Jull Costa

Men and women who are educated, sophisticated, and successful, doctors, businessmen, and academics, people who go to movies and read novels, in other words, people like you and me, believe that those we interact with each day – family, friends, colleagues, fellow passengers on the bus – act in sensible, more or less predictable ways. We think we can take what our loved ones and associates say at face value, and that we know them by what they say and how they act. To us, the world is, for the most part, an orderly, reasonable place. In Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías tells us that we are fooling ourselves, that people are often not at all what they seem, that even those closest to us are often deceitful, dangerous, and violent. It is a world in which innocent remarks may have disastrous and unforeseen consequences. Worse yet, we don’t really know ourselves. As Marías’ protagonist says in the final volume, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell:

It’s astonishing how wrong our perception of ourselves always is, how hopeless we are at gauging and weighing up our strengths and weaknesses. Even people like us, who are gifted and highly trained in examining and deciphering our fellow man, become one-eyed fools when we make ourselves the object of our studies. It’s probably the lack of perspective and the impossibility of observing yourself without knowing that you’re doing so. Whenever we become spectators of ourselves that’s when we’re most likely to play a role, distort the truth, clean up our act.

Poison, Shadow, and Farewell is 95% interior monologue, with a smattering of dialogue fitted around the slimmest plot. Marías writes long, looping, graceful sentences, in which phrase after phrase build on each other so as to more clearly explain human behavior, often enumerating possible future happenings or the range of responses. His work often reads like many short and long essays on behavior, identity, time, and much more, spliced together to form a treatise on the human condition. For example,

Erase, suppress, take back, cancel, better to never have said anything, that is the world’s ambition, that way nothing exists, nothing is anything, the same things and the same facts and the same beings are both themselves and their reverse, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards and in the long-distant past. And in between there is only time that does its best to dazzle us, the only thing with purpose and aims, which means that those of us who are still traveling through time are not to be trusted, for we are all foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, with no idea of what we might be capable nor of what end awaits us, foolish, insubstantial, unfinished me, no, no one should trust me either . . .

Marías is a masterful writer whose work is intelligent and compelling. In a sentence that might have come from the sublime W. G. Sebald he says: ”It seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common.” His sentences have an intricate beauty and rhythm about them that nearly takes your breath away, as when Deza is talking about his estranged wife’s response to seeing him again: “Yes, it was rude of her to be in so little hurry to recognize me in the changed man, the absent man, the solitary man, the foreigner returned; not to find out what I was like without her, or who I had become.” One of his most effective stylistic techniques is to use repetition to elaborate meaning: “I lingered and delayed,” “as if to soothe or placate him,” “sees them as a tie and an impediment and a hindrance,” “people hate being left out or passed over,” and “time again condensed or concertinaed.” Marías is often quite funny, as in “… as you know, the dead are very quiet and never raise any objections . . .,” and “commit other unimaginable acts of nincumperpoopery.” Marías talks a lot about language – the accuracy or inaccuracy of translating certain phrases (“Tupra had used the English equivalent of ‘Sálvese quien pueda’, which means literally ‘Save yourself if you can’, whereas ‘Every man for himself’ denotes perhaps fewer scruples”) and etymology ( “ . . . and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin ‘oculus.’”)

The meager plot of Poison, Shadow, and Farewell concludes the story of a middle-aged Spaniard currently living in London. The narrator, essentially the same character Marías has written about previously in All Souls and Dark Back of Time, was an academic but now works for a shadowy, organization, in the “building with no name.” The clear implication is that the narrator, Jaime (or Jack or Jacobo, and sometimes, Jacques) Deza has been hired by a British intelligence agency run by a man named Tupra (or Reresby, Ure, or Dundas) to observe individuals, in person and in interviews, live and recorded, in order to assess what the interviewee might be capable of. In volume II, Deza accompanies Tupra to a disco so that he can “evaluate” one of the people in their party. While there, an acquaintance of Deza’s flirts with the wife of the man he is supposed to size up which causes Tupra to react with extreme violence. Deza is shocked by Tupra’s outburst but is even more amazed when, at the end of Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, he acts in almost the same way in response to a perceived danger to his wife. Even the clever analyst of the behavior of others could not predict his own behavior.

I clearly remember reading, years ago in school, a passage written by John Locke in which he traces the path from one thought to another then another and so on until his current thought is miles away from where he started. Marías’ writing is much like that; one event or thought leads him on a mental journey during which he considers alternative paths, analyzing where each might go, its possible effects, and what each might mean. The prose with which he expresses his imaginative ideas is lilting and beautiful, almost poetic. For the last few years, Javier Marías’ name has been mentioned for the Nobel prize; reading Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell it is easy to see why.

Reviewed by Stan Izen

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell by Javier Marías; trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
New Directions, 2009.
Cloth, 480 pp, $24.95
ISBN-10: 0811218120
ISBN-13: 9780811218122