YOUR FACE TOMORROW PART 2: DANCE AND DREAM
by Javier Marías translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Chatto (July 20), £17.99; 352pp

WHEN JAVIER MARÍAS embarks upon a novel, little is decided in his mind. “Some writers begin with a map,” he explains. “They know what they are going to encounter beforehand. Others — such as myself — have only a compass. The compass tells you where to go, but you don’t know what you’ll find — a cliff, a desert, a lake.”

It is ironic that the narrator of Marías’s latest, continuing work, Your Face Tomorrow, evinces the opposite: an uncanny ability to discern what will come next. Jacques Deza, the reincarnated protagonist of his earlier, Oxford-set, novel All Souls, is a Spaniard in London, drifting after the collapse of his marriage in Madrid. Recognising his extraordinary abilities of perception, a former colleague ushers him into a career in espionage, working with a clandestine organisation that tries to “read” people for signs of their future behaviour.

Readers have waited more than a year for the translation of the novel’s second part, Dance and Dream, but those who enjoyed the first will have healthy reserves of patience.

Marías’s narratives are not dramatic or action-packed: they are slow-breathing, measured ruminations, introspective and philosophical. The few events that occur in the narrative “present” are broken up by long, Proustian passages of recollection and speculation. By the end of Part 1, Fever and Spear, we know surprisingly little about the organisation Deza has joined, or about his work, and all sorts of questions remain. How are their reports used? Who are his shady superiors? Where is Deza’s involvement leading? Those hoping that these mysteries will be unravelled in Part 2, Dance and Dream, will have to exercise further patience, for they remain largely unsolved; and Marías still hasn’t finished Part 3.

But we do learn plenty about Deza himself, following him down tortuous mental tunnels on his long digressions. And as his character crystallises, an ironic shadow is cast over his whole “parenthetical” existence in England. His new job involves predicting the future, but his prescience could not prevent his faltering marriage; and as he repeatedly observes, people and relationships are always in flux.

Can we take his job seriously? Isn’t Deza just clinging on to a futile sense of certainty, trying to steady his balance in a world beyond his control? Perhaps these are the questions we most want Marías to resolve in Part 3. What we can expect? “There will be a linking of different elements and some explanations of a few things that have been hinted at. I hope I will be able to tie things up.” But with only half of it written, much remains undecided. Is Deza an ironic figure? Perhaps Marías doesn’t yet know.

The density and polish of Marías’s prose has a lot to do with his curiously restrictive method of composition. “I write with a typewriter; I have never used a computer,” he says. “I work very hard on each page, and the moment I think I can’t do better I put it aside, and I don’t make a second version. After that, I force myself to be consistent with what I decided to write in the first place.”

The resulting style occasionally drags its feet, but its steady, purring rhythms and exuberant vocabulary are the very qualities for which he is so admired.

These qualities have been faithfully rendered into English by Margaret Jull Costa. Her translation of Fever and Spear was shortlisted for this year’s Oxford Weidenfeld translation prize (see right). It is tough to translate even a paragraph of prose with the sophistication and erudition of Marías; to translate a whole novel with this degree of success is a formidable achievement.

One of the most interesting aspects of Jull Costa’s translation is her decision to preserve the long, involved sentences of the original, which is a festival of parentheses and sub-clauses. The result, arguably, is English that sounds a little unusual, not quite native. Marías, himself a veteran translator, insists that a sense of foreignness is a virtue. “It’s good to feel that a translation is something added to the language. That’s the wonderful, miraculous thing about it.”

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