(Wrapping up Your Face This Spring, we have a guest post from Neil Griffin, another prolific commenter. Here he articulates why he found the world of Your Face Tomorrow uncommonly absorbing.)

Like Scott guessed in a previous YFTS post, there were readers other than him who skipped ahead and read the book quicker than our planned time-line, and I was one of these book-club-rule-breaking offenders. I didn’t start cheating right away. The first few weeks I assumed that I would stick to the schedule, since I had eased into the book leisurely and enjoyed reading 50 or so pages a week and soaking in the consciousness of Deza in all its anxious and wise glory, and then exiting after the prescribed pages with no symptoms of withdrawal. I was even able to read other unrelated books in between assignments and then pick up from where I left off rather painlessly.

Then Tupra came into the story.

I threw the syllabus into the slow-moving river as soon as Deza was swept into Tupra’s world of shifting identities, translation, interpretation, fever, spears, and, ultimately, poison. There’s a section in the first book, when Deza describes his surveillance where I did indeed feel like I was under some feverish spell, from which I didn’t recover–if indeed I am recovered–until the final page of the third book.

So why did I enter this book so thoroughly?

When I tried to explain the book to my friends they thought me strange for being drawn into this world, which I articulated rather on the nose. In Fever and Spear, for example, I explained the plot, as follows: “There’s a Spaniard living in London who gets invited to a party, where he meets an interesting person, whom he eventually works for. He also finds a spot of blood on the stairs and speaks to his old mentor about the atmosphere during the great war.”

Cue looks of confusion and empty words: oh, sounds like an interesting read.

And my friends’ indifference makes sense on a plot level; there really isn’t much going on externally. But Marias makes the book stick to the reader by bringing up universal thoughts, worries, and anxieties through the medium of Deza’s mind. The thoughts colliding into one another create phenomenal images and wordplay that still circulate through my consciousness, even though I finished this two months ago: the ephemeral snow on shoulders, the slow river, the fever, the scratch, farewell my friends, the dancer, the bathroom of bare legs and brutal assaults, the sword, the murdered baby, baiting the man like a bull, Custardoy’s eyes, and the dormant silence always ready to erupt, while the shadow of the 1930s and 40s remains splattered in the present like the rim of blood, which is the hardest part to remove from my memory.

This is the best way I can articulate the magic of this book: through assorted fragments, gestures, thoughts, and insinuations that have been poured into my mind’s eye like an ecstatic poison.

(We continue our reader responses to Your Face Tomorrow with Maylin Scott, who made quite a few comments during out read. Here she talks about the pivotal scene where Deza stands up and dances, and how it refracts throughout all three volumes of YFT.)

Having now finished Your Face Tomorrow (and read All Souls and Dark Back of Time for good measure–fascinating and complimentary reads both), I keep coming back to one pivotal section that seems to encapsulate many of the resonating thoughts and themes of the novel.

The scene takes place right in the middle of YFT (Volume II pages 185-201) which I don’t think is at all coincidental, and it is the one where Deza looks out his window at his neighbour dancing with the two women, then starts to dance himself, eventually realizing the trio are in turn observing him and copying his dance with the newspaper. They signal to Deza to join them and he, embarrassed, backs away. At first I was in the spell of how breathtakingly beautiful the image was–that section contains some of the best writing in the whole novel–but I think it serves a much more important narrative function. And it’s all to do with the fact that Deza refuses to join in the dance.

As the novel progressed, I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader frustrated (but still intrigued) by Deza’s character–his brooding aloofness and apathy, both in his initial response to his job (and its possible sinister implications) but also particularly in his relationships with women. Marias never lets us glimpse Deza when his love life is flourishing. In YFT, he’s separated from Luisa and we don’t get a sense of how they met or their early courtship and marriage. In All Souls, he is brooding over the absence of his lover Claire and the eventual end of that affair. And there couldn’t be a colder, more dispassionate and mechanical sexual encounter than the one Deza has with Perez Nuix, made all the more sad and horrifying by Deza’s competitive obsession with whether Tupra has also slept with her. Marias has created a main character who muses intelligently and philosophically over life but stands outside it as a reluctant participant. And this dancing scene is a crucial narrative turning point. Deza is invited to join in, to participate, to engage with his neighbours and he refuses. He needs to remain the passive outsider. But this is also the midway point of the novel when Deza turns from being the observer–of the clients he makes reports on, of Tupra’s horrifying actions with the sword in the washroom, and his subsequent viewing of Tupra’s videotapes–to becoming the active instigator of violence in the episode with Custardoy, forcing him to act in a way contrary to his previous beliefs as to what he is morally and physically capable of.

So why does Marias create this distant outsider? This personality suits Deza for his spying duties, but it curiously distances the reader from engaging more emotionally with the character. Reading Dark Back of Time–a sort of philosophical meditation on the blend of fiction/reality that resulted in Marias’s life as result of having published All Souls–illuminated a number of aspects of Marias’ style and intellectual concerns, a key one being the fine line between fiction and reality, or the perception of how closely they can become intertwined, mostly through strange coincidences. (These can be as slim or amusingly innocuous as the one experienced by myself–reading in Dark Back of Time about Melville’s treatment at the hands of his stingy publishers while in a hotel room located on Melville St .) Marias likes to explore how literature, consciously or not, affects people’s subsequent actions and in YFT, he seems to be challenging his readers to put themselves in Deza’s position in terms of being either a passive observer of the novel, or to actively engage with its ideas (as we’ve been doing in this forum), and let it continue to influence and reverberate through your own life. And there couldn’t be a better metaphor for this notion than inviting one to dance with a newspaper, to dance with words as your partner.

This “dance” is also a dance with literary tradition, fascinated as Marias is with notions of time and memory, both historical and cultural. Readers here have compared him in style to Sebald, Bernhard and Proust in particular. But where Proust takes a submerged moment in time and, from a different temporal perspective, examines how that memory can change, Marias almost suspends time. He freeze frames the episode, has his narrator walk around it, ponder it from all angles, and then turns the projector on again so that the event loops concurrently alongside the narrative present, with frequent inescapable incursions into it. As such, I’d like to suggest that, thematically at least (and definitely not in terms of writing style), the novel that YFT reminded me the most of is Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, though this comparison didn’t hit me until I’d finished the book. Marias’s novel is a dance with the music of time, or a dance with time itself, with an accompanying narrative movement and use of language that is graceful, sensual and elegant. And so back to that key episode and the end of that section and Deza’s summation of himself: “That is what I will be, what was and has never been. That is, I will be time, which has never been seen, and which no one ever can see.”

But Marias has made us see, giving us an imaginative vision of time in this extraordinary novel.

(I’ve asked some of the participants in Your Face This Spring to share some final thoughts about the book to help us wind this project up. First up is Ginny Brewer Pennekamp with some excellent thoughts on the Bond angle to Your Face Tomorrow.)

I began Your Face Tomorrow aware that Javier Marias wrote this book for his heroes–Peter Russell and his father Julian–who taught Marias how to live life but were on the verge of leaving it. Mid-read, John Wooden died, adding a personal shade to this UCLA Bruin’s read. I wondered: what will happen to his teachings? How will the world change? Have we lost a compass on how to make our way in the world?

As I thought about this, I kept coming back to the very big hero looming over Deza’s strange adventure–James Bond. Bond is unequivocally a hero, the best spy ever, the man that saved the world over and over again. Yes, he specialized in incredible violence. Yes, he seduced every woman in his path. But the end justified his means. However, in YFT, James Bond is a hero of the past. The world has changed. MI6 is a different institution. To me, one of the essential themes in this novel is who becomes the James Bond of the modern world, how does he operate and with what responsibilities?

Deza is lured into MI6 by Bond. On the night of his qualification test, Deza finds Fleming’s inscription: “To Peter Wheeler, who may know better” and follows Wheeler where Wheeler followed Fleming, the man who invented Bond. Deza enters MI6 expecting Bond and Fleming’s world but instead is presented with three versions of the modern spy–Tupra, Wheeler, and his own father. Each provides Deza with a different set of choices about his place in the world and his responsibility towards his fellow man.

Tupra is, of course, the most similar to Bond. Like Bond, he is a blunt hammer of justice. He beds multiple women, follows the orders of superiors, keeps quiet about his activities. But unlike Bond, the information Tupra acts on is unclear and sometimes entirely made up. Also unlike Bond, he uses many alias. He is not patriotic–he works for England but also for anyone who pays him. The outcome of Tupra’s work is murky; it’s not clear if he does good or harm. Yet Deza follows Tupra’s lead unquestioningly until Tupra assaults de la Garza in the nightclub, and then we see our first instance of Deza analyzing Tupra’s methods: “You can’t just go around beating people up, killing them.” Deza asks. “But why, according to you, can’t one do that?” Tupra answers [V2 p. 339], seemingly satisfying Deza. After all, like Bond they are attacking a greater evil.

Deza parrots Tupra’s behavior when he returns to Spain, going so far as to check with Tupra before confronting Custardoy. Interestingly enough, in this episode with Custardoy, Deza mimics James Bond in the novel The Spy Who Loved Me, which follows Bond as he defends a woman from a gang of men who threaten to harm her. Deza actually becomes Tupra’s version of the Bond who acts without thinking on the basis of imagined information.

Deza says of the men in Tupra’s video:

. . . perhaps like Perez Nuix, and like Wheeler and Rylands, they don’t hold trials or gather evidence, they simply solve problems or root them out or stop them ever happening or just deal with them. . . . And to guess what will happen if they don’t intervene . . . the sort who make remote decisions for reasons that are barely identifiable to the one who suffers the consequences or is a chance witness, or without waiting for a link of cause and effect to establish itself between actions and motives, still less for any proof that such actions have been committed. Such men and women need no proof . . . they lash out with a saber; indeed on such occasions, they don’t even require the action or events or deeds to have occurred. [V3 p. 361]

In this description, Tupra and his division resemble the America that fabricated the existence of WMDs in Iraq, that increased surveillance on the general public after 9/11, that bullied the world without pausing to make sure that the end goal was just, right or deserved.

Deza initially lumps Wheeler into Tupra’s group because he once worked there, too. But as Deza’s consciousness evolves, he begins to separate Wheeler from the rest of the pack. Like Bond, Wheeler is patriotic, carrying out justified orders of a country in the midst of war, when good and evil are clear. Every mission has a higher purpose towards an end goal. Wheeler explains to Deza:

“Do you imagine that I haven’t committed repugnant acts, things which, if I think about them now or in the future, could perhaps have been avoided? . . . They’re repugnant to me now and will seem more so as time passes, the farther off they get, but they weren’t then.” [V3, p. 512]

Unlike Bond, Wheeler is reluctant to use violence, going as far as to spare a double agent’s life when directly ordered to kill him. He devotes his life to one woman, to study, to the pursuit of truth. This is the Wheeler Fleming knows when he notes he “may know better.” Wheeler’s MI6 was not Bond’s, the methods he used were different. Wheeler distances himself from Tupra’s generation of spy when he says:

“the Americans–who, in part, copied us when it came to subversion techniques and who have reveled in using them ever since (rather clumsily, it must be said)–never learned to apply them as we did, to play it as a game despite the gravity of the situation. Far worse, they didn’t give it up in peacetime.” [V3, p. 475]

In this, Wheeler resembles England’s place in the modern world, led by the American bullies but still thinking of a time when they were in control of the world and presumably were more thoughtful and just.

Wheeler’s distinction between how things were run then and now prompts Deza to resign from the MI6, return to Spain and ultimately follow the example set by his father. Deza Sr. is the complete opposite of Bond and Tupra and prides himself on it:

“But the thing I feel happiest about, Jacobo, is that no one ever died because of something I said or reported. Shooting someone, during a war or in self-defense, is bad, but at least you can go on living and not lose your decency or humanity, not necessarily. However, if someone dies because of something you said or, worse still, invented; if someone dies needlessly because of you; if you could have remained silent and allowed that person to go on living; if you spoke out when you should or could have said nothing and by doing so brought about a death, or several . . .” [V3, p. 401]

Deza, still unaware that he has done exactly what his father condemns, answers:

“That was perhaps how it was before . . . my father still imagines he’s living in a world in which deeds left some trace and which conscience had a voice.” [V3, p. 402]

However, Deza Sr. knows the world has changed. It is only Jaime/Jacobo that has not yet developed a conscience or a voice. Deza Sr. tells Jamie:

“It’s sad watching an era in decline, when one has known other far more intelligent eras. Where’s it going to end?” [V3, p. 398]

In practice, the novel ends with Tupra, the new, corrupted Bond still in charge of keeping the world order. It also ends with Perez Nuix, who becomes Tupra’s successor after Deza deserts the MI6–a spy so out of control that she games the system for her own advantage, sleeps with the enemy without having the courage to look him in the face, finishes without having made any real difference in the world.

According to the book The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder, Bond was invented to give the British the satisfaction that they still controlled the destiny of the world at a time when, for the first time, Britain was no longer the dominant empire. Marias takes this a step further to show us the model of the current spy in this world of fuzzy borders and grey conflicts. We should be responsible for each other. We should rely on facts, we should double check that our actions are just and executed for the right reasons. Deza comes to us this conclusion when he says:

My face will resemble and be assimilated into that of all those men . . . who were once masters of time and who held in their hand the hourglass–in the form of a weapon, in the form of an order–and decided suddenly, without lingering or delaying, to stop time, thus obliging others no loner to desire their own desires and to leave even their own first name behind. I don’t like being linked to those faces.” [V3, p. 374]

Deza chooses to be linked to the face of his father, to not hide from the world but to set a different example for the future. He describes the path of his own journey many times during the course of the novel:

time will see it off, it will be time, time that will cure it–of those who have not yet reached their end and are still groping their way uncertainly forwards or walking lightly with shield and spear, or slowly and wearily with shield all battered and spear blunt and dull, without even realising that we will soon be with them, with those who have been expelled and those who have passed and then . . . then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous, why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my fever, my word, your pain, and all those doubts, all that torment? [V1, p. 185]

Come, come, I was so wrong about you before . . . I just couldn’t see you clearly before. [V3, p. 208]

In the end, as he warned the reader in the very beginning, Deza synthesizes his father and Wheeler’s experience, even tipping his hat a bit to the fictional James Bond:

One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion. [V1, p. 3]

So Deza throws aside Bond for the men “who may know better” and gives us a new example of how to watch over the world.

In light of our ongoing discussion of history, politics, and terror in Your Face Tomorrow, I found this 2004 editorial by Marias very interesting. It was published in The New York Times just after the train terror bombing that many claimed “swung” the Spanish elections, an assertion that Marias clearly has no tolerance for:

After the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, the Spanish population immediately perceived two things clearly: First, that Prime Minister José María Aznar’s administration was indirectly responsible for the horror, which would not have occurred if Mr. Aznar had not been so eager to promote his alliance with Tony Blair and George Bush. Second, that his administration had lied about the probable authorship of the attacks – or concealed or delayed the truth, which under such tragic circumstances amounts to the same thing – for political advantage. The problem with such “perceptions” is that, accurate or erroneous, true or false, there’s no way to uproot them from people’s minds. Such convictions are of little use in the eyes of the law, but they are useful when it comes to deciding whom to vote for in a general election. That, and nothing but that, was what happened in Spain.

Marias also goes on to inform citizens of the U.S. that the war on terror isn’t really a war. An obvious point, but perhaps one that still needed (and needs) to be made. At any rate, I can understand where Marias is coming from. Anyone who reads his evocation of the nastier aspects of the wars of the ’30s and ’40s in Your Face Tomorrow will comprehend why he loses his patience with people who would compare our current “war footing” to that of Britain and Spain:

Here in Spain, we don’t feel as if we are at war, because we aren’t. And neither are the inhabitants of the United States, however vociferously many Americans may insist that they are. War is something else entirely. No semi-normal life can be led while a war is going on. The Madrilenians who lived through the siege of their city from 1936 to 1939 know that very well. The survivors of the daily bombardments of London during the Second World War know it, too. And those Americans who participated in that war know it also.

The editorial is a little dated at this point (no one beyond some diehard Glenn Beck fans and Jonah Goldberg still believes we were or are “at war” in a conventional sense, do they?), but it does provide an interesting window into where Marias’ head was at in the middle of writing Your Face Tomorrow.

I must begin this with a confession: as I suspect many of you have already, I went drastically ahead of schedule in my YFTS reading. It’s a testament to Marias’ abilities as a storyteller that after 1,000 pages of this book Volume 3 has me more hooked than ever (and that’s saying something, as YFT is certainly not a book that flagged for me very often). I do have some critiques of this book, but I will say that more than anything I’ve read lately, YFT has satisfied hugely on the level of plot, something I seem to be finding less and less often in literary fiction.

But anyway, onto the blogging! Though I’m ahead and will likely finish before the week of July 11, I’m going to continue blogging the read up through that week as though I weren’t. And I should preface all of these final posts with the fact that I have very mixed opinions about divulging any spoilers for these last couple hundred pages, given that the plot is so ripe, and I hate to spoil a good plot for any reader.

I’m curious to know people’s opinions on why Marias has chosen to label this segment “shadow.” It’s an odd choice for a section that takes place during Deza’s return to his home country, a place he has been pining for throughout YTF and which one would think would inspire a noun with more presence than shadow. Yet his opinion on Madrid and his life there is very ambiguous. At one point he says that two weeks is a good amount of time to be home, since after seeing his kids and friends he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. That’s certainly not how I felt upon returning to my hometown after two years in foreign countries. And Deza seems to be at a distance from all the people and things he comes back to. His father in particular seems worthy of the word shadow, though even Deza’s return to his apartment, children, and books is strangely muted.

Distant as Deza’s father did seem, though, I found the scene in which father and son are back together one of the more touching and well-wrought segments in the entire book. The moment on page 272, when Deza momentarily becomes the father and his father the son, was lovely, as is the fragment “and so perhaps, more than anything, he saw now with his memory.”

But I feel like I’m burying the lede here, so let’s get right to the main event from this segment: [Spoiler alert] Who was surprised by Luisa’s shiner? It seemed inevitable that some complication would arise once Deza returned to Spain, and it seemed even more inevitable that it would involve Luisa, although the turn to violence in this form was a bit of a surprise. And of course Deza’s parenthetical words (words we’ve been leading up to all throughout this book) will prove prophetic: “(who knows when anything will stop once it’s begun)” [257].

And I’d also like to put forth this question from the comments to last week’s post:

I suppose it’s the sort of thing one ought to have seen coming, but has anyone besides me found themselves less and less able to identify with Deza, or to excuse his decisions, over the course of the the “Poison” and “Shadow” sections? Tupra I can grudgingly respect; he seems acting on an ideal. Deza seems oddly & increasingly incapable of caring about much besides his own personal spheres, the things that are important to him. As far as we know, that wasn’t & isn’t the case for Tupra or Wheeler.

I can kind of see this, as Deza has been more or less holding up an ideal contrary to Tupra’s view of the world, but now with Luisa he’s so easily prepared to abandon all of that. It would indeed be easier to bear if Deza was willing to admit the superiority of Tupra’s world from the start, but he continually insists on upholding a contrary standard, and it is disappointing to see him abandon it at this juncture.

And now for something completely different. I loved the section where Deza is looking at the paintings in the Prado [301-17]. Marias is a writer frequently put in the same conversation as Sebald, and though I didn’t see a lot of obvious stylistic similarities throughout YFT, I could definitely see it here. This section had the same “sifting through the archives of history” quality as Sebald, particularly with the images of the paintings Deza observed sliced into the text. I particularly liked Deza’s reading of “The Three Ages and Death”:

. . . in the background, a solar landscape that looks instead lunar, grim and desolate, with a ruined tower in flames; the inevitable cross hangs in the sky. I had always wondered, eve since I was a child if the young woman and the old were the same person at very different ages or if they were two separate women. I mean, if the older woman had always been tugging at herself from youth onwards and into old age, when she finally allows herself to be carried off by Death, for if that were not the case, the subject would be graver and more troubling. [314-5]

I like the injection of ambiguity in there, whether the older woman drawing her younger self toward old age and death or a corrupted woman simply looking to corrupt another. (Both interpretations have obvious resonances for YFT).

And lastly, I’d like to point out all those statues that Deza comes across as he tracks Custardoy through Madrid (and what an odd name in a book of notable names). With their little nameplates and sentence-long bios they seem the very embodiments of the long past stuck somehow in the present, not wholly of it but not wholly irrelevant either. It felt very appropriate for Deza to smack up against them again and again and again at this point in the book, the one moment where Deza is perhaps more in the present–and divorced from the long past–than any other so far.

The first thing I’d like to remark about on our current section of Your Face Tomorrow (we’re in Week 13) is this was the first moment in the book where I distinctly felt that Deza’s “fever” had ended. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact line where this happened.

Deza’s fever, as he refers to it again and again (and again), of course begins with his whole entry into Tupra’s team of interpreters; in fact, maybe the first onset of the fever is at Wheeler’s party, where he comes across two of the odd characters that we will see so much more of in this book: Tupra and Rafita. This initiates the whole series of activities and relationships Deza enters into, which, in my reading, culminates with the savage beating of Rafita and then is chewed over a bit during Deza’s strange encounter with Tupra at his house that same night, where they watch the poisonous videos, and finally dissipates away as the two travel for business.

Which then brings us to this line, found on page 210: “I also postponed my departure for a little longer on our return from Berlin, in order to find out first what had happened to De la Garza.” To me these are the words of a man who sees the foregoing events as ended; that is, neatly sectioned off into his past and no longer a creative, living part of his ongoing life and identity (his “face” as it were).

The book now, I believe (although I don’t really know since there’s a good 250 more pages of it to go), seems to be entering into the phase where we try to make sense of what happened in the initial 800 or so pages. I don’t feel a whole lot of closure surrounding everything from the party to the disco, and I doubt that Deza does either, and I would think that these concluding pages will offer some sort of incident or encounter that juxtaposes meaningfully with the whole fever and spear and dance and dream and poison. (And speaking of poison, I found it interesting that Deza likens the videos to poisons being injected into his body, given his rather animated discussions of the various uses of botulism toxin.)

One final tidbit for now: given how almost every name we encounter in this book gets remarked on in one way or another, it seemed worth noting that I don’t recall Marias making any comments about Rafita de la Garza’s name. This seems a serious omission, given that all other characters who have appeared as much as Rafita have gotten the treatment. So this is what I found, for what it’s worth: “Garza,” or “de la Garza” is a very common Spanish surname, and Garza commonly translates as “dweller at the sign of the heron or dove.” In Mediterranean Italian it has the more promising translation of “a gauze bandage,” which would have clear resonances for YFT. (And, perhaps, given Marias’ inclusion of a southerner so prominently in Rafita’s part of this book, perhaps this is the translation we should give precedence to.)

(Hey everyone–I’ve asked Richard Hutzler (known to us all in the YFTS comments threads as “RJH (formerly Richard)”) to do a guest-post for week 12‘s reading of Your Face Tomorrow. Big thanks to Richard for some awesome thoughts, and I hope to be able to add a few of my own before the week is out as we pull into the last 350 pages of this mammoth read.)

I’m excited to have this chance to write a post for Week 12’s reading, and just want to begin by thanking Scott for putting this group read together. It’s been tremendously fun. And so now we come to the root of the title of this section: “Poison.” I found so much of weight in these 57 pages that I will go through a few of them in mini-chapters.

Co-Fornication (or Faces, or The Beast With One Back)
Deza’s rumination upon ge-bryd-guma, or co-fornication, was both disturbing and fascinating (and, as with so much of what Deza thinks and expresses to us, even vaguely comical). It seems to me that Jacques feels at once a kind of accomplishment (in the sense of having won a small battle in an unspoken rivalry with Tupra now that they’ve both, as he assumes, slept with “young Perez-Nuix”) as well as a kind of disgust (a sort of “narrative horror” of his own?) with himself. He’s made uncomfortable, at least for a moment, by the fact that they have both slept with her. And while Deza does not explicitly express this thought, as I read these paragraphs I found myself wondering at the fact that Perez-Nuiz allows him to have intercourse with her, but only with her back turned. They do not make a “beast with two backs,” in this instance, but rather a beast with one back and one face—a face which Deza cannot see. He even wonders at the fact that Tupra and Perez-Nuix must have slept with each other face to face . . . and I find myself wondering about Deza’s confusion about these faces with which he’s surrounded himself—not only their “faces tomorrow,” but their faces today. Who are these people? Can he trust them—any of them? Can he trust himself with them? Has he begun to lose his own face?

Names
We discussed earlier the curious mixing of Tupra’s names at the end of Vol. 2. Here, Deza takes it further, continually referring to Bertram as “Reresby”—the name he was using at the disco, and in his attack upon De la Garza. At one point, in last week’s section, he runs through an almost comical list of names for himself, Tupra, and Wheeler: “ . . . we don’t even call ourselves by our real name, but only by a false one or by whichever of the ever-changing names that keep coming along and being added, be it Rylands or Wheeler, or Ure or Reresby or Tupra or Dundas, or Jacques the Fatlist or Jacobo or Jaime” (p. 103). To which we might add: Yago, or Iago . . . the name Reresby uses to either joke with or perhaps subtly reprimand, or even threaten, Deza (“I know you”).The names, the faces . . . which face is any of the characters wearing at any given moment?

Poison (And Telling)
One of the great lyrical lists of the novel so far comes on page 157: “I wanted an end to the fever, my pain, the word, the dance, the image, the poison, the dream . . . ” But before that, we see Deza recognizing how filled with poison he has become, not only here, through the viewing of the videos, but throughout his relationship with Tupra/Reresby/Sir Death and the organization . . . the repeated references to Richard III woven throughout this section, centered on Richard III’s tormented night of dreams during which he is visited by those whom he has killed so treacherously, highlight Deza’s increasingly tenuous, and tension-riddled, state of mind (“Dream on of bloody deeds and death,” and “Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake.”). Recall the second sentence in the novel (from Vol. 1): “Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed, rare is the close bond that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end, become so tangled that a razor or knife is needed to cut it.” How twisted has this knot become for Deza?

Eyes
The poison here, unlike much of the other poison throughout the first two volumes, comes not through the ear (“I’ll pour a pestilence in his ear” says Iago about Othello), but through the eyes. The play upon “one-eyed” sleep and “one-eyed” oblivion, brought to the fore again so far in Vol. 3, echoes for me here . . . but Deza is almost forced to keep looking with both eyes open as Reresby runs through his scenes of sex, torture, and death. The image of inoculation is chilling: “something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin ‘oculus,’ from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could not longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them” (p. 124). I’ve mentioned in earlier responses to other posts that the blood stain contains for me a heavy echo of Macbeth. Tupra himself has become through all of his experiences—both direct and indirect—stained.

The State
If we were not overtly “political” before (and of course we were—the references to the Spanish Civil War alone, and many of the long conversations with Wheeler, deal directly with the insidiousness of the State and politics), we are now. “How could it possibly not suit us that people should be weak or base or greedy or cowardly, that they should fall into temptation and drop the occasional very large gaffe, or even be party to or commit misdemeanors? That’s the basis of our work, the very substances. More than that, it’s the bedrock of the State. The State needs treachery, venality, deceit, crime, illegal acts, conspiracy, dirty tricks . . . .If those things didn’t exist, or not enough, the State would have to invent them” (Tupra/Reresby on p. 128).

Patria
Deza has made reoccurring references to the idea of patria, or country, through each of the three volumes . . . He has also, at times, referred to the fact that, in England, he is both literally and figuratively in another country, in a kind of dream that will one day end, when he will choose to return to Spain. Curiously, the phrase “in another country,” has been repeated so many times I cannot count them. I mentioned a few post responses ago that I had read All Souls and Dark Back of Time after finishing Vol. 2 early, and in both novels, there are numerous layered references to Christopher Marlowe and his apparent murder in a tavern, because he was a spy, and to this quotation from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta:

Friar Bernadine: Thou hast committed—
Barabas: –Fornication. But that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

I don’t know what this means yet, but it really echoes for me here, as Deza muses upon the fact that Tupra seems to see no separation at all between himself and his actions and his country. Throughout this section, we watch Tupra come disturbingly close to the language which turned so many people off during the previous Presidential administration here in the States…and which has, of course, ruled so often throughout history. (And who else was fascinated by the American, wearing glasses, in the torture scene on the video? Rumsfeld?)

Summa
This section raises many more questions for me than it provides answers. For instance, how much further will Deza allow himself to become entangled in this organization and with Tupra/Reresby/Sir Death? Will we ever learn whether Tupra knew about Deza’s “betrayal” of him with regards to Incompara? Was that entire story a kind of set-up? In other words, I’ve become so suspicious of each of these characters that I even find myself wondering if Perez-Nuix went to Deza with Tupra’s knowledge (far-fetched, perhaps, I know, but still . . . ). How will Deza get out of these entanglements? How poisoned will he actually become, and what act or acts will he commit that may turn us against him, or lead us to regret how truly stained he has become? Will he return to Wheeler for guidance? What will become of his feelings about Tupra?—for he seems to still admire him to a great degree, even after witnessing the near-beheading and beating of De la Garza, even after seeing firsthand (or secondhand, anyway, through videos) how far Tupra is willing to go, how cold-blooded and diabolically patient he is willing to be.
What did you think of Tupra/Reresby’s justification to Deza—that he did what he did because he had to, because if he had not nearly beheaded, then tortured and terrorized De la Garza, Manoia would have done much worse? Does it hold water with you? What does Reresby here reveal about the “state of the State” in our world?

And finally, I ask all of you out there reading: how much has Deza’s face changed since we met him at the beginning of Vol. 1? Are these changes for the better? Has he become less “naïve,” more “worldly”? And if so, is this a good thing? If you’re like me, you’ve come to greatly admire, even love, Deza—so intelligent, so passionate, so human, so filled with many of the same feelings I, at least, have about our current world, so reflective, so curious, so lost to himself in so many ways…so lost, period. Have your feelings about him changed now that we’ve reached the final volume, and are approaching the final two sections of the novel?

Time permitting, I’m going to do a summary post of vol 2 the way I did one for vol 1, but for now I’d like to add a few more thoughts that I didn’t get into the earlier post about our final slice of vol 2.

On page 288, I found it very noteworthy that Deza draws a comparison to Wheeler when Tupra gives him his comb back:

He handed it back to me. Unlike Wheeler, he hadn’t taken the precaution of holding it up to the light to see if it was clean when I gave it to him . . .

This brief image doesn’t simply send us back to Wheeler but also back to that whole wild scene to end vol 1 with the helicopter brushing Wheeler and Deza (which is why Wheeler needs to borrow Deza’s comb). But first of all, let’s deal with Wheeler vis a vis Tupra.

Clearly Wheeler acts as a sort of father-figure for Deza when he’s on the British island; he is sort of the presiding patriarch of vol 1, and after reading vol 2 I feel as though Tupra acts in a similar capacity for that book. (And later, on page 308, Tupra is directly compared to Deza’s father.) Clearly, Wheeler and Tupra represent different facets of the image of a patriarch, perhaps in line with the theme of each book; perhaps they are in a way fathering the face that Deza will display to the world “tomorrow,” once this adventure in England has come to a close for him.

But to get back to the final scene of vol 1: I find it interesting that each book ends with a bravado scene of disarray and violence, and that Marias is at pains to link them there with that reference on page 288. Seen from this perspective, the two volumes overlay rather well, with Wheeler/Tupra acting in similar capacity in each, each volume concluding with a bizarre scene that touches Deza deeply, and then there being a final period of reflection that gives on to the following volume.

I also think that now is an appropriate time to talk about the covers, which, frankly, at first mystified me but now I believe I have come up with a theory about. First, let’s recall that these are in fact the covers that Marias chose to grace these three books. (Unlike the vast majority of authors, he was given the honor of being allowed to choose his books’ covers, and thus we can consider them part of the overall composition.) So let’s have a look at them together:

What I notice on the first is that long open road: we are just starting out on a long journey, and we are looking down the front of a motorcycle, a vehicle that typically conveys isolation, even something of a rebel image. There is still all that road ahead of us to travel, and we are perhaps adrift in a foreign land. It brings to mid Deza, alone and in Britain and unsure of where he is headed.

Then in the second image we see a train powering toward us under a full head of steam. We can hardly see the track at all here; the frame is instead taken up by that big, chugging train, which impresses us with its force and dedication to steam forward right past us. If we are on this train we are not thinking of where we are headed; no, we are simply being taken along for the ride, and we concern ourselves with our own personal matters, or perhaps admiring the countryside that we are passing through. It is an image that implies that Deza is no longer so concerned with the path he has chosen but rather with the people and things he finds as he is being drawn down that path.

And lastly, we see an image of an airplane that I believe had just landed. It is almost the opposite of that first image: instead of the front of the plane we see its back side, and the vehicle itself obscures any sight of the road (in this case a body of water) that may or may not lie before it. We have set down and our journey is ended, and we will disembark separate from the rest of the people we have traveled with (perhaps across the English channel and back again on the Continent).

Taken together, the images constitute to me three different phases of a long journey, beginning, middle, and end. They are perhaps emblematic of Deza’s journey, representing the mood and spirit of each phase of the journey that he undertakes in the books whose cover they grace.

And lastly, here’s a very YFT-esque news tidbit indicating how far this country has gone to embrace fascistic beliefs in our lust for security. Wheeler would be appalled.

So now that we’ve all finished vol 2 (or will have finished it soon), I’d like to ask everyone to weigh in on Tupra (or Reresby–and here’s a question to start off: Did anyone notice any rhyme or reason to how Deza applied each of those monikers throughout vol 2? I’m not sure I did.)

But anyway: Tupra. In my reading, the point of Deza recalling that awful story his father told him about Ronda–where the fascists baited a man like a bull as they murdered him for sport–the point of that was to draw a comparison between Tupra’s actions in the restroom to what those fascists did to their prisoner. And I would say that, even despite the wide gulf between Tupra and a fascist lackey, the comparison is not altogether invalid. I came into that scene wanting to see Rafita get what was coming to him, yet I came out of that scene wishing he hadn’t gotten what Tupra gave him.

And I think this is a crux of this book. Clearly this incident has stayed with Deza–perhaps it is that drop of blood that he cannot wipe away–clearly, Deza has lost faith in this enterprise in a very real and meaningful way. Do you find that valid? Did you too lose faith–or maybe respect is a better word–in Tupra after that sadistic lashing? And is Deza’s clear sympathizing with Rafita–a man he has only contempt for–a sign of his humanity, and perhaps his redemption from this nasty business he’s been pulled into?

Or is Deza not redeemed? Throughout this long book we’ve met with countless instances of people either being complicit with evil or doing nothing to stop it, always with the feeling (at least on my part) that Deza condemns those who participated and believes he would have done differently. But now perhaps we can say that he has joined them. I’m not sure, though, and the answer will rest i part on what happens in this long conversation that between Tupra and Deza that is cut off a the end of vol 2.

A criticism: I found the last chunk of vol 2 unnecessarily slow. Throughout Your Face Tomorrow, Marias has clearly been an author who tends toward more words than less, yet it was never quite so intrusive as it was in the final pages of this book. I just found the sentences too overrun with clauses that seemed to serve no real purpose, and then the paragraphs too overrun with sentences that more or less said the same thing as the one before. For instance, this fragment of from when Deza imagines Tupra is interrogating him after the beating:

Perhaps we should start by asking why he took the sword out in the first place. It was melodramatic and unnecessary and, in the end, he didn’t even use it, except to cut off the hairnet and frighten his victim half to death, and the witness too, of course. One has to ask oneself whether he brandished that sword purely so that I would see it and feel alarmed and shocked, as indeed I did, or, I don’t know, so that I would believe he was capable of actually killing, without giving it a second thought, in the most brutal manner and for no reason. . . .

First an observation: how interesting that Deza parses this shocking and horrible experience by turning to the man who was responsible for it (it’s as though Deza has had his mind infected by this man! Can he understand his world in no way other than to filter it thought Turpa’s questions?). But as to this chunk, I see no need for “and unnecessary” after “melodramatic,” nor any need to recapitulate what happened with the sword (we just read it). That big first clause in the second sentence could lose a number of words, in fact that whole second sentence has a lot that feels extraneous.

And so on, for pages and pages. For me, this typified the reading experience of these last 50 pages or so, and bloat has been something I’ve been keeping an eye out for throughout the book (you can’t not when dealing with something well over 1,000 pages). So I would like to know if people felt the book was slowing down a bit too much.

One last thing: It looks like Terry from Vertigo–which I know as “the Sebald blog”–has joined us.