Latest Krasznahorkai Link
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
All right, so I’m assuming that everyone who reads this post is up to page 180, also known as the end of section 1, “Fever,” in accordance with our schedule.
So I’d like to put a question out there: in what sense is section 1 a unified, conclusive piece of writing, and why is it given the title “Fever”? I’m guessing as we get further into this long book (not a trilogy!) our answers to this question will change, but it’s worth thinking about right now.
Also, now that we’ve gotten into the meat of this first book, I’d like to return to the question of Marias’ influences. A couple of commenters from my last post had some interesting things to say on this question:
That said, I’m not stunned by the work. Let me offer a comparison. I’ve been required recently to read and/or reread all of Conrad and Faulkner. There are, by the way, moments that seem Conradian in style. But when you read pre-1900 Conrad or any of Faulkner from 1929-1940 you can’t help but underline every other sentence. Each sentence is a minor masterpiece: filled with stunning wisdom, eloquence, and grace. I haven’t underlined but one or two sentences of Marias so far. Now I know we can argue about contemporary prose styles, etc. But take a classic like Absalom Absalom, the first chapter alone of which astonishes in a way that YFT just doesn’t (to me).
Now I must confess my Proust is more than weak, so I can’t comment, but am curious, about Proust’s role here. I’m moderately well-read in Sebald, but don’t see much influence there in the prose style at least (Sebald has some magnificent moments). Instead, you get a lot of this in YFT: “I did X, not really X, more like Y really, or even Z, but with a mix of X and Y, which I hadn’t even wanted, or didn’t think I did, at least at first.” The basic style is a statement, then lots of qualifications about it. I do find it engaging, but distinctive without being eloquent. Perhaps this is Proustian? Other influences?
A final note: I do wonder if these books are acclaimed in the limited circles who care about these kind of things because they are in a way a lot about, yes, literature itself. That is, much of the philosophizing in the book is about the possibility of narrative and such. Kinda like Bolano’s use of literature types as heroes.
I’d say that Marias is very concerned with continuity, both as individual identity, and as members of a nation state as subjects and citizens. And here I see a resonance with Sebald; more specifically, his concerns with national history, and how a nations people accept a false history, because it’s forced upon them or easier to accept. Or, … that’s the question each author seems to investigate, in different ways.
I’d say there’s some truth to both of these comments. As to the first comment: I don’t want to get into the question of Marias’s style vis a vis past masters, except to say that for now I’m trying to take it on its own terms and I’m largely enjoying it, if not finding it quite as dense as some of the authors cited above.
I largely agree with the remark that “The basic style is a statement, then lots of qualifications about it.” I agree that that’s not very Sebaldian, although it is extremely like Thomas Bernhard, another influence on Marias that we discussed last week.
As to the second comment quoted above: I think the remarks about Sebald are very true. Sebald certainly is very big on the personal interpretation of history vs. the systemic interpretation, and I can already see that this is going to be a huge part of this book. I also like the insight about Marias being “very concerned with continuity, both as individual identity, and as members of a nation state as subjects and citizens.” Up to this point we’ve already seen some substantial changes regarding identity and perceptions thereof, and I believe that some even bigger ones are in the offing in the near future.
Now then, a few other things. I liked this quote from near the end of this section. To set the scene for those not reading along: the father of Deza, our narrator, has just told him a long story about this man who betrayed him during the Spanish Civil War, leading to a prison term for Deza’s father. Then Deza’s father makes the surprising admission that he more or less forgot the incident and moved on with life, instead of holding a grudge or trying to avenge himself. As explanation, he tells his son:
It may be hard for you to understand this, but trying to avenge myself would simply have meant wasting more of my time because of him. . . . Bear in mind that when you look at your life as a whole the chronological aspect gradually diminishes in importance, you make less of a distinction between what happened before and what happened afterwards, between actions and their consequences, between decisions and what they unleash. [175-6]
This struck me as a fine example of the different between the story told by chronology (the official story) and the story told by memory (the personal story), which we often inappropriately mistake for chronology. When we’re in the heat of the moment, we put a lot of stock in cause and effect, and thus we tend toward chronology. But as time passes we become less emotionally involved in things that happened to us, and other understandings of events–less reliant on cause and effect–begin to loom larger. In those times we begin to work more in the frame work of the personal, of memory. I think this distinction is highly worth remembering as Deza narrates events from his life that are closer to and farther from his present.
I think this is all very much worth considering in juxtaposition with the preceding 50 pages or so, in which Deza engages on an all-night romp through the bookshelves of his host Wheeler tracking down a sort of official history of a man named Andres Nin during the Spanish Civil War. I’m not quite sure of the importance of this Nin, other than to highlight the history told through official channels versus the private history of individuals, but I’d say it bears remembering in any case.
Two more things: what to make of the drop of blood that Deza finds and effaces from Wheeler’s house? Clearly this is a fine example of Marias putting in an important detail that he doesn’t know the significance of and will not change (as per his method of writing), but is it a MacGuffin, or will it end up being a meaningful part of whatever narrative emerges for Deza and Wheeler?
And secondly, I want to pick up on a comment from earlier this week and ask if anyone other than Maylin took the Bond reference to heart and watched From Russia With Love. Does anyone see any larger thematic reference here, or is this just the a purely personal cross-reference of Wheeler’s?
And last of all, on page 159 we get what I believe is our first mention of the title, in this quote: “How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?” Again, this is trading very heavily in the theme of judging character, already so crucial to this book. It is also invoking the theme of being able to project future actions from past events, in effect arguing for the importance of history to our lives today, another substantial theme in this book (and a matter Wheeler will take up quite explicitly in our next chunk of text).
(post thumbnail: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoutedrop/ / CC BY 2.0)
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading:
- YFTS: The Hardest Part About Fictions Is Not Creating But Maintaining Them A couple of things I wanted to point out from the first 20 or so pages of the segment of Fever and Spear that we're...
- YFTS: Some Thoughts on the First 90 Pages of Your Face Tomorrow and the Perils of Talking Now that we've gotten our feet wet with the first 90 pages or so of Your Face Tomorrow, some initial thoughts. For those who aren't...
- YFTS: Javier Marias as Translator Turns out we’re having a bit of a translation theme this week. As I noted on Monday, Javier Marias is not only one of Spain’s...
- Your Face This Spring Okay, let’s do this. Starting this spring, I’m going to read Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Whoever wants to join me on this...
- Your Face This Spring: Here We Go! And we’re off! I’m very happy to say that after my call for all the participants to send me a little email last week, I...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
I appreciate the Bernhard pointer. I need to read him too! A question on the style, then. One interesting thing about the long sentences of Marias is the run-ons. That’s different than, say, Faulkner, or even Peter Weiss, who write complete grammatical sentences, albeit long. The length is constructed through conjunctions and relative clauses.
Does Bernhard use run-ons?
BRC: I think so, although I’m not exactly sure how “run-on” is being used here. In my opinion, many of Bernhard’s lengthy sentences would be run-ons in that they’re really many, many independent sentences joined together with commas.
In any event, it’s a good distinction to be made. To my mind, it’s the difference between a third-person narrator and a first-person, the latter having a lot more reason to resort to run-on style sentencing.
I wanted to throw out a few of my own simple, broad impressions about the meaning of “Fever” as a title for this section, mostly because that’s exactly how I felt reading it (in an obsessive kind of trance, like in the dreams you have when sick). I have felt under the influence of a fever, too, when in Deza’s place, frantically searching for the answer to something, unable to quit. The hallucination the blood and the escalation of Deza’s drunkenness made it feel more feverish to me. (I’m not sure if the blood will eventually become important or rather stand as a constant nagging question about how much of that night was real and how much may have been in Deza’s own imagination, under the influence of this fever he is in.)
So much of this section was about introducing characters and their passions. Even the more minor side characters, the dancing man and de la Garza, were overtaken with their own kinds of fever — a compulsion to dance and an insatiable desire for women.
Also, I’m reminded that when one is in the process of getting sick, a fever is usually the first symptom. It feels to me in this section as if Deza is developing a fever for Tupra and his work, being drawn in and pulled under for the first time. Much like an illness, I suspect this fascination for Tupra’s work will turn in time and Deza will become less excited and enamored by the secrecy and idea of the and more appalled at what he’s gotten himself into. (By the nature of the work as it’s been described to us thus far, I sense him becoming more like the betrayer of his father than like his father.) The progression, “spear, fever, my pain, words, sleep & dreams”, reminds me of the entire progression of an illness when said in that order, as on p. 4.
I have been thinking more about the Bond film in relation to the novel and of course it was – ahem – staring me in the face so to speak. For those who haven’t seen the film, the opening sequence involves a man stalking Bond in a garden at night. He kills him and then just before the opening credits, it turns out that the man killed wasn’t Bond of course, but wearing a face mask to look like Bond (it’s been a training exercise). Which eeriely ties in with the title of novel and that quote on page 159 – I don’t think it’s at all unintentional that Marias chose this particular Bond film to reference.
The chronology of the narration is interesting – one step forward in real time, then back in memory. This has echoes of Proust but also Woolf (and she too was often obsessed with feet – see the many references to shoes in Jacob’s Room for example). It’s not the same style as Woolf of course, but I do think there are similarities in themes of time and memory.
I’m intrigued by the comment above that Deza may turn out to be more betrayer than like his father – hmmm, if so, I wonder if it will be intentional or not, given the lack of real information or follow-up details surrounding his work.
Hey Ginny, I quite like your description of fever and illness, and I would like to take it even further, beyond the level of the individual, to the level of the nation and suggest that Marias has performed a national diagnostic that hints at a national illness. It’s that persistent blood stain, and the recurring image of the languid murmering river, which connects like a thread to the past, as well as what I’ve come to learn about the context in which the novel was written. I believe the work is overshadowed, and influenced by what has come to be referred to in Spain as the pact of forgetting, wherebye Franco’s friends and foes agreed to a mutually benificial amnesty law, in effect putting the past to one side during the transition to democracy. Yet, despite these efforts to bury the past in the interest of reconciliation, many victims of Franco’s purges continue to be unearthed in mass graves. All of which seems to lead to an inexorible situation, like an illness, that proves tenacious and hard to recover from, to heal from and to move beyond–like Deza’s father managed to do.
I too checked out From Russia With Love, and can see some parallels with Marias’ novel. Specifically, it’s mention of the ultra secretive and dangerous branch of the Soviet secret police that supervises and controls the bureau that will eventually be known as the KGB. I guess I am just wondering if the reference to Ian Flemming’s novel has any significance regarding Marias’s indications that all writing is inherently political–as Deza’s, feverish, insistence about the persistence of fascist thought and fascist authors and poets, seems to demonstrate.
Language & style: I am really enjoying Marias, and am glad I am reading the book with a group, which forces me to slow down and avoid just gulping down this book. I’m especially interested in his frequent use of the word “ingenuous” so far. I wish I had started counting when it first popped up. It pricks up my ears to see it used so often. . .it heightens my anticipation of lots of betrayals and disillusionment ahead.
Fever, Spear: I think the above comments’ ideas about the Fever are quite good. I find myself puzzling over the spear. The sentence at the bottom of page 159, through the top of 160, which equates “the point of the spear” with. . . well, I’m actually too confused by this sentence to parse it here. But in any case, the word spear makes me think of Christ on the cross, and the soldier raising his spear to stick his side. (Too many trips through the stations of the cross in my younger days? Possibly.) But of course, as Marias states a bit later, Judas is the ultimate turncoat friend, so maybe there’s something to that resonance.
I’m looking forward to the next thread about this book. I’m almost done and the last 100 pages have been a miracle.
Hey all: a lot of great comments here. I like the Bond scene that Maylin describes for us. So much of it seems pertinent to these books, from the man following Bond through the garden at night to the fact that it’s not actually Bond but another man in a mask. It seems to capture a lot of the feel of the book, the feel of menace and secrets beneath even the most quotidian of settings, the sensation of thinking you know someone only to see that person unmasked (which happens very emphatically, for instance, with Wheeler).