Status
Available
Call number
Series
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Publication
Torino, Einaudi
Description
Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías's three-partYour Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed "exquisite" (Publishers Weekly), "gorgeous" (Kirkus), and "outstanding: another work of urgent originality" (London Independent).Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza--hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception--back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.
Media reviews
Javier Marías’s magnificent, sui generis three-part novel, “Your Face Tomorrow” — all 1,200-plus pages of it — is consumed with the attempt to locate, parse and make music out of the deep grammar of language and power. While the prose is exquisite and never less than fluidly,
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balletically pleasurable, the project is both fundamentally troubling and fundamentally troubled. Every chamber of its heart is dark and uneasy, and though Marías brings matters to a close in the final volume, “Poison, Shadow and Farewell,” one might say that instead of coming to a definitive point, he has, instead, expanded the unanswerable questions to their farthest extent. The very last sentence merely pulls the pin on the final grenade. It’s as terrifying as it is beautiful. Show Less
“Your Face Tomorrow” requires patience, effort and intellectual discipline of the reader. “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” delivers a payoff at the end, but the real challenge, and pleasure, is in getting there.
User reviews
LibraryThing member cecilyb
Utterly and poetically brilliant.
LibraryThing member thorold
I held off writing anything about the trilogy for a couple of days after finishing this final part, but I'm still not really sure what I feel about it. In a way I agree with the other reviewers here who hated it (maybe especially with the person who said that Marías is "un onanista de la
The writing is beautiful, of course, and the English translation seems to be remarkably seamless — not a trivial achievement for a book that is so preoccupied with the process of translation and with the less-than-straightforward boundary between English and Spanish. It's also writing that draws you on and makes you keep reading: I was surprised to see that I'd got through the 1200-odd pages of the trilogy in not much more than a week. It perhaps isn't a book that you would sit reading for hours on end (you need a break from time to time to think about it and get your bearings) but it also doesn't seem to be easy to put down for very long.
Predictably, the subject-matter is often uncomfortable for the reader, but it seems to be less gratuitously so than in A heart so white. Although the narrator is still largely self-absorbed, events push him into a situation where the problems he has to reflect on are no longer primarily his own, but correspond to more general human issues of agency and responsibility. He is trying to work out how far we can be the authors of our own stories, how much we can be blamed for the intended and unintended consequences of what we do and say, and how it is that we can find ourselves doing things that by any reasonable standard should be completely repulsive. Naturally enough, there are no neat answers on offer, and we are left at the end of the book with the deeply unsettling feeling that we might well be as capable of betraying our friends or taking part in acts of violence as the narrator is.
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lengua"!); in a way I also agree with the people who see this as a great and wonderful novel.The writing is beautiful, of course, and the English translation seems to be remarkably seamless — not a trivial achievement for a book that is so preoccupied with the process of translation and with the less-than-straightforward boundary between English and Spanish. It's also writing that draws you on and makes you keep reading: I was surprised to see that I'd got through the 1200-odd pages of the trilogy in not much more than a week. It perhaps isn't a book that you would sit reading for hours on end (you need a break from time to time to think about it and get your bearings) but it also doesn't seem to be easy to put down for very long.
Predictably, the subject-matter is often uncomfortable for the reader, but it seems to be less gratuitously so than in A heart so white. Although the narrator is still largely self-absorbed, events push him into a situation where the problems he has to reflect on are no longer primarily his own, but correspond to more general human issues of agency and responsibility. He is trying to work out how far we can be the authors of our own stories, how much we can be blamed for the intended and unintended consequences of what we do and say, and how it is that we can find ourselves doing things that by any reasonable standard should be completely repulsive. Naturally enough, there are no neat answers on offer, and we are left at the end of the book with the deeply unsettling feeling that we might well be as capable of betraying our friends or taking part in acts of violence as the narrator is.
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LibraryThing member stillatim
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
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.
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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.
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Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2011)
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (Longlist — 2010)
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
2007 (Spanish edition)
2009 (English translation)
ISBN
8806194135 / 9788806194130
Other editions
Tu rostro mañana, 3. Veneno y sombra y adiós by Javier Marías (Paper Book)