Javier Marìas

I tried this guy and he's sort of interesting but ultimately a little long winded and boring. Seems to be very big on the Continent though.

when i went to the store to buy these they only had #1 and #3 but i bought them anyway bcuz the first novel "fever and spear" sounded like a fantasy novel & seemed to promise adventure. and so far the murky sprawl that constitutes the story is kinda epic fantasy but i guess the obvious genre touchstone wld be spy novels which i dont really read.

anyway its really good so far although theres a temptation to overreach when describing it (an early version of this post claimed it "throbbed" i mean) but i feel like im probably missing a lot

Still keep meaning to get round to him after being on a Machen/Gawsworth et al tip a year or so ago. Keep us posted, Lamp.

haha its really tempting to blog my progress w/ these books if only to help myself muddle through my own reactions. i was draped across the sofa reading this all afternoon and at one point, deeply frustrated, i got up & walked into the bedroom where my bf was practicing guitar and started reading aloud to him, from the book. the long, loping sentences 'work' a lot better read out loud & the philosophical aposiopesis that hushes every idea becomes a little less crushing. i read to him from a chapter in which the main 'character' - who is more like a machine or an idea - reminisces about his family. he spends a lot of time on a maternal uncle, murdered during the first days of the spanish civil war, of whom nothing remains but a worn photograph. or maybe the photograph is of someone else. or maybe there is no photograph. so i read it all to my boyfriend, including this:

I had, I thought, left almost everything in order, and had even cleaned up a strange bloodstain that I had neither spilled nor provoked and which now, in the midst of my drunkenness and tiredness, and just as I had foreseen before erasing it for good and expunging its rim or last remnant, was already starting to seem unreal to me, a product of my imagination. Or perhaps of my readings.

which seemed important or at least telling somehow. when i asked him what he thought he just laughed at me and shrugged his shoulders and turned back to his guitar.

Hmmm, I don't blame him. I've got a fairly low threshold for that sort myself of thing to be honest. I just don't care enough. Is this what you want to write about? Is this what I want to read about? I think to myself. And often the answer is no.

finished the first one last month, this month has been real busy so the second one has been slow for me (was hoping to keep up with conversational reading's schedule to finish it quickly) - I really love it, think that the first volume once it's done leaves a really huge impression, just the arc of what's actually a very small amount of narrative action in "present" time (i.e. the nearest of the many stories Deza tells to the perspective from which he's telling them all - about which as of the middle of vol. 2 we still don't know anything) - I should be working more on Dance and Dream instead of posting to ilx tbh but well anyway yeah I'm reading this & loving it

the one helpful thing I might be able to say is, if you can read big chunks at a sitting, you really get a better feel for the movement, the shape of the bigger story, how things fit together. once the perspective sort of gets clear then it's easier to read a little & come back.

i am going to take a while to get around to these, sounds like

i mean hey i thought they were about spies and shit

they are!

and like the spying stuff is ultra-mysterious and bizarre and cool!

do you really think these are 'about' spies? the spy stuff feels p peripheral (at best) so far if the 1st book is 'about' anything its subjectivity & consciousness

this books subject is the subject-object problem

"spying stuff" gets a lot better in the 2nd half. the first interview that the narrator sits in on w/ the venezulan general is incredible - thoughtful and fraught and really funny all at once - but some of the digressive hypothetical character studies seem to 'get away from him' and 'spiral in on themselves'. they are some amazing passages in the dick darklove section but it was on the 'all and all' just 'too much'.

now i have to find a copy of the 2nd book

jaundy im sorry if i annoyed you but help me decipher this dudes blog about fever and spear: http://thinkingblueguitars.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/review-javier-marias-your-face-tomorrow-fever-and-spear/

also thomp i think you wld really like these books

"spying stuff" gets a lot better in the 2nd half. the first interview that the narrator sits in on w/ the venezulan general is incredible - thoughtful and fraught and really funny all at once - but some of the digressive hypothetical character studies seem to 'get away from him' and 'spiral in on themselves'. they are some amazing passages in the dick darklove section but it was on the 'all and all' just 'too much'.

yeah the whole 1st half of the 1st book is setting the stage for what the developing action will have done to the narrator, so that you can have his traumatized mindset fully in mind when the actual shit starts going down in Dance and Dream. so that every encounter can sort of come pre-packaged with weight.

you didn't annoy me btw. I don't think that guy you're linking is OTM. I think Fever and Spear is an extrapolation on the first sentence of the book - "one should never tell stories" &c - in that sense, almost a classical theoretical text but way more fun to read than that makes it sound like

Dance and Dream is fucking v. high quality btw, loving it, I expect to finish it within the next few days & then on to the next one!

that dude annoyed me but i also agreed w/ or least thought it was interesting in partic "every age plagued with subjective relativism is at the same time an age of objective absolutism".

in that sense, almost a classical theoretical text but way more fun to read than that makes it sound like

haha i still havent managed to find a way of describing this book that didnt make it sound terrible or opaque or overwrought but its really none of those things. its not really a 'novel of ideas' but it is naked in its intellectualism & thats hard to ignore.

he also makes 'analysis' really difficult by leaving open these really obvious symbols/metaphors/ideas and then changing their context over and over disabling the 'meaning' the carry. not in an open or challenging way but like a sandcastle when the tide is coming in. (also i keep reaching for these retarded images when im thinking about/trying to describe what hes doing: magic eye picture, maze, masquerade so im sympathetic that blog dudes box talk)

i need to fucking phase out reading so many blogs & start reading novels again -- b/t this thread and the New Yorker thread i'm going to have even more books to add to the queue

haha i still havent managed to find a way of describing this book that didnt make it sound terrible or opaque or overwrought but its really none of those things. its not really a 'novel of ideas' but it is naked in its intellectualism & thats hard to ignore.

yeah that's the thing! I mean, so little happens, and there's all this play with tenses & order-of-events that means almost nothing's ever happening in the immediate-historical-past - like, so far, the present-tense action of both books is dude-is-remembering-a-time-when-he-did-this-job. but as it progresses, there's this depth to the actions, and how fucked up the observing-people job actually is starts to become clearer, and then there's all kinds of stuff going on with the what-the-dude's-job-is vs. how reliable could you actually be at that job? vs. isn't that what an author is doing all the time? vs. and what about you, dude who's reading? only with no explicit reference to these concerns: just a story in which, while little is actually happening, the suspense-novel feel is so consistent that it's kind of magical. you know? it's like, it's an exciting book, but that's hard to convey when describing it.

I fucking adore his overuse of the comma, by the way - he'll completely change the subject of the sentence he's presumably in, just go into a whole different place, with none of the agreed-upon punctuation symbols to let you know that happened. I think a big subject of the book is: who can you trust? what do you really know about anybody? which is an existentialist theme, right, which means this is actually in some pretty gone-over territory, so what's unique about it is that Marias makes these feel like very fresh concerns.

ksh you don't actually have to get into everything everybody is into. not trying to be a dick ok just sayin'.

O_O Where did that come from? I was an English major dogg, it's not like I'm all "oh man, I want to read novels b/c it's the thing to do!"

I've just been doing a lot of philosophy and internet reading and not nearly enough novel reading.

sorry yo, personal thing between me and "I need to hear this/read this" contributions to threads

just drives me nuts for some reason

No problem. :-)

entirely by coincidence - at least on a subconscious level - i started reading dashiell hammett after finishing fever and spear & was struck by how similarly compelling both books are, just on a mechanical level. it helps that marias breaks the book into almost short story like sections but yeah its amazing that a book in which almost nothing actually happens manages to be engaging on just that basic "what happens next" level.

theres also a submerged rage in the 1st book that i took some time to 'get'. passages like:

Within the confines of the same language, their entirely artificial aim was not to be understood or least only partially ; it's an attempt to obscure, to conceal, and, with this end in mind, they seek out strange derivations and fanciful variants, defective and highly arbitrary metaphors, tangential or oblique meanings, that can be separated off from the common norm, they even coin new and unnecessary substitute words, to undo what was said and to mask what was communicated.

amazing comma usage aside brim with fury at the limitations and subterfuges inherent in language and thought. it really does all circle back to the first two chapters, about silence and betrayal.

man Lamp you gotta get onto the second volume because some subtle shifts happen that will really give you big wow moments & I would love to hear what you have to say about it - the view we have on the characters starts to undergo multiple clarifications, but again without a whole lot actually happening. I was pretty certain something very intense was about to happen but I'm heading toward the end and not yet - but the feeling of dread is amping up hard. conversational reading suggested that the way to do this book was as fast as possible ("this book" = all three, they take the three as a novel in three parts) and I feel like that's right, that breezing along is a good idea.

i wanted to! but i couldnt find a physical copy of the second book in this entire city. i did manage to find a mint copy of tusk on vinyl for $8 but i had to order the book from amazon.

omg tupra!!!!!!

A few years ago i was given tomorrow in the battle and a heart so white, in spanish, by my little cousin. The beginning of a heart so white is maybe my favourite of any novel, but i never finished either of it. In my defense reading something that's pretty fucking long-winded in a foreign language is fairly tough. Always meant to go back to them, and I think I will and report back - after i've finished the books I've got on the go at the moment.

either of them! jeez

how far along are you now jd? i finished the third one last night & im trying to i guess come to grips w/it still. one thing that makes it hard is how good the book (counting all three here) gets at making you forget the things that have come before each moment seems so big & fraught that i kept getting lost in them.

also i watched cria cuervos... last week & i v much recommend doing so its a p great counterpoint to the novel(s)

I'm in the 3rd & final part of the last one. so far I don't love the final volume as much as the 2nd, which was such a tour de force, but that scene that dominates the "poison" section, that conversation, all that stuff...that'll be with me forever it feels like, really intense. but yeah there is this amnesia-fraught-present-moment vibe to the whole thing. "fever" I guess. pretty awesome

ha & yeah I missed your "omg tupra!!!" post, I assume that's from "dance & dream" when shit gets WHOA WHAT -- incredible scene, that whole thing, + tupra's question ("why, according to you, can't people just go around" etc) -- really great stuff

yeah tupra in the 2nd book is just: every moment every scene every memory feels endless whatever is being observed seems infinitely knowable but anything outside of that moment is entirely hidden so when he combines that with i guess thriller/noir tropes the menace feels unending and almost unbearable. like you couldve been stuck in that bathroom stall forever

i didnt really like the 3rd book outside of the narrator being forced to watch the dvd. the stuff in madrid was diffuse & sort of tiresome. i did really like the conversation that he had with his sister-in-law something about the way the spoke so much the same

I gotta defend the third book - I agree that the "Shadow" section sags badly & is the weakest part of the whole deal, but given that it follows "Dance" and "Poison" which are some kind of showstopping combo punch, it's hard to fault it too hard - "diffuse" is a good word, it seems to lose its bearings. maybe that is part of the point. but I thought "Farewell" picked up the thread again beautifully & was something of a tour de force; I can't remember a book in recent memory that satisfied me as much in both explicitly tying all the ends together (the last book I read that tried had me yelling out loud for the last 100 pages "SHUT UP, NO ONE CARES, SINCE NONE OF YOUR CHARACTERS NOR YOU ARE INTERESTING ENOUGH, JUST STOP WRITING" - Butler & Dickens kick ass as doing the sweeping-up thing but most moderns who try are just intolerable) and trying to arrive at some concluding, more-than point. I really thought a lot of the the "Farewell" part was some of the best stuff in the book - p. 520 sent chills through me, just great. this dude is great I will read more of him, I understand one of the characters (Deza?) was actually in a previous Marias book?

im reasonably sure that all souls deals with his time at oxford, before he came to london and began working at the building with no name.

i didnt have the same reaction to "farewell" although i did appreciate it, especially the way the stuff with dick dearlove came full circle. but theres a point a little after the page you cite where he says the experience of working with tupra was "less transformative, because I was an age when it was harder to change" that "all you can do is ascertain and confirm what is you carry in your veins" & this strange, stubborn discounting bothered me. a lot. especially in the face of "poison"!

there was a sense to me that deza was continually constructing every present moment as a box & that his insights and meanderings and predictions were the walls he made to keep the past and the future out. i got tired of how discrete and static he made everything, how if you can never see tomorrow's face and if the past is a cipher or a dream how disconnected we really are, from everyone and everything. the final chapter was so lonely & so tiring that him admitting the entire thing didnt really change all that much - it deflated me. right from that seemingly digressive chapter on the miranda warning theres been a tendency for most of the characters to associate empathy with weakness, to make their understanding exploitative or indifferent but always cold. and so deza has pursued freedom from everything but an eternal now & its hard to see how valid or valuable that is.

- still like a week after ive finished these books havent really been able to read anything else because im still thinking about them

- the more i think about wheelers story about his wife's propaganda work i start to find it amazing, the chalk outline or the rim of blood around the main characters capacity for forgetting, for turning a blind eye, for self-avowal

- its really easy to start wanting to imitate his cadence & sentence/thought structure

- got a copy of all souls

i have wanted to read, but i have not read, one of these new javier marías books, now that they're no longer new and when i just finish reading this book of bolano's short stories, i will enter my bedroom, sit on my armchair, get myself comfortable, and find the first page of this book that was given to me by my own cousin, who is from Madrid.

i posted so much itt!

they are wonderful & inscrutable all at once though. & those sentences are like an elegant trenchcoat hung from a peg - perfectly draped.

i have read the first passage of heart so white so many times, it is definitely up there with my favourite openings for a novel. up there with Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento...,Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know..., Stately, plump Buck Mulligan... etc. yet i've still never gotten round to reading any more of it. i have "tomorrow in the battle think on me" somewhere as well.

I'm loving fever and spear at the moment. Deza's ransacking of Wheeler's study, all the Spanish civil war stuff and the conversation w/ Wheeler the next morning. Tupra's interrogation of the Venezuelan chap. The accounts of the staff watching the vids, cctv footage etc. I love how its all going so slow and how Marias offers us little tastes of what's going on. This is one the best books I've read for ages! Marias is so enjoyable to read.

i have wanted to read, but i have not read, one of these new javier marías books, now that they're no longer new and when i just finish reading this book of bolano's short stories, i will enter my bedroom, sit on my armchair, get myself comfortable, and find the first page of this book that was given to me by my own cousin, who is from Madrid.

― Efraqueen Juárez (jim in glasgow), Thursday, September 23, 2010 5:19 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

lol, it seems you've been influenced by marias's sentence structures!

The books section of the London Metro freesheet continues to throw up pleasant surprises - today a centrefold piece on Javier Marias (admittedly billed as a piece on a famous spy thriller writer, but the meat of it is fairly otm as far as it goes).

Found the first one of these again while moving house (third time in a year, oy) at the weekend, got annoyed at the number of books I've been carrying around and not reading

There's also a story of his in the new issue of Harper's (I think it's the new issue) but it's from the story collection that comes out around this week or so.
I think my favorite part in any of his books is in the third volume of Your Face Tomorrow where the narrator is watching one of the Babe the Pig movies, and the narrator wonders if the pig who played Babe, or any of the animals in the film, won Oscars for their roles, and I think he calls the pig who played Babe "the porcine emulator of De Niro" or something. He's just totally joking with his audience but you can tell he's having fun with it.

His new one,los enamoramientos, comes out in spanish next month. Here is the first chapter for ye hispanohablantes http://www.elpais.com/elpaismedia/ultimahora/media/201103/29/cultura/20110329elpepucul_1_Pes_PDF.pdf

So far,so marias.

I finally finished All Souls this weekend. Nowhere near as good as Your Face Tomorrow to be honest, but it was interesting to see themes popping up again. It was kinda like YFT but without all the intrigue and spying etc. also I enjoyed recognising bits in Oxford it talked about. and the climactic ending was quite good actually.

just picked up the elvis interpreter novella, am pumped/posting

this isn't new or anything btw, just posting

i wanted to! but i couldnt find a physical copy of the second book in this entire city. i did manage to find a mint copy of tusk on vinyl for $8 but i had to order the book from amazon.

― terrible poster (Lamp), Friday, 4 June 2010 06:16 (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg tupra!!!!!!

― Lamp, Friday, 11 June 2010 01:25 (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^i enjoy the progression between these two posts

I read through the thread before seeing your post thomp & I was going to copy and paste that exact combo with a v. similar response to it!!

ha i've stopped there until i finish pt 3 in case here be dragons or something

these are basically just amazing tho

Been thinking about rereading Your Face Tomorrow. Such a great trilogy.

::blushes::

one of the things that i really loved about these books is that they were invigorating to think and write about whereas so much stuff i read, i just bogged down or tired trying to think about my reaction to it, to find something interesting or worthwhile in the impression it left. idk these books were p amazing i guess

ha i have kind of the opposite reaction -- nine tenths of what i read i'm conscious totally of my reaction to it & where i'm situating myself in relation to it. whereas this i was totally caught up in & i feel like what i might say in a 'critical' line is sort of beside the point

i think partly bcz how totally fascinating it is as craft -- i mean, i'm less taken with this as a 'novel of ideas' or whatever than i am amazed at how compelling it makes twelve hundred fairly uneventful pages, and makes tremendous weight land on a half dozen moments that couldn't be experienced as a big deal without what's behind them -- i've been going on at people about it and i find myself going 'no the guy realises someone is following him home and it takes like five hundred pages to resolve what's up with that, and that's amazing' and they go 'so what's it actually about' and i go 'oh, you know, spies and stuff'

(and now i have finished it i have gone back and read the thread --)

re: the continuities with other books: all souls (which i just ordered) is apparently about all the oxford types that deza mentions in the first section -- nb. i am kind of glad i waited until i had met some oxford types to start reading this, ha -- and dark back of time is a gloss on all souls that sort of leads into this

what i hadn't seen mentioned was that custardoy is all over a heart so white: the character that luisa's sister-in-law calls to get the scoop on him is that book's narrator, and what he explains about custardoy is all stuff he mentions directly there. it was kind of weird to see him showing up, actually. -- but i wonder if that accounted at all for my not thinking the third book sagged at all. -- also possibly that i went directly into reading it from the second, so i wasn't reading it as anything but one big, long novel (and it really seems like the natural break between books, if there were to be one, would fall at the end of 'poison'). -- but shadow seemed to be kind of implacable in terms of, this is how this would have to happen - a logic of structure that couldn't not go any other way, given how everything's been framed. (whereas farewell seemed to go back to being way more human and having some room for chance operation, rather than, er, self-perpetuating narrative permutation (which n.b. i'm not saying is a bad structural principle in any way))

'permutation' -- i kept waiting to see if the recurring line about 'my fever, my spear, my dance and dream' (etc) would ever show up with all seven ducks lined up in a row, which i guess i'm glad it didn't -- also i was curious about his choice of 'spear', which seems to be lacking the metaphorical freight of the other six (unless it has some other weight in spanish, though i feel like jull costa would have glossed that somewhere): and then it shows up in an incredibly literal fashion

likewise i was amazed (given how he seems to be, normally, with his titles, and his running lit. quotes - 'a heart so white' must directly reference the scene in macbeth it gets its title from a dozen times) at how casually 'your face tomorrow' was glossed eight hundred pages -- & curious whether anything is to be made of the switch from 'thy' to 'your', given how much weight there is here on 'usted' and 'tu' (and 'mr tupra' and 'bertram' and 'bertie', amongst all the others)

also i am very curious who people pictured dick dearlove as whilst reading

i did not know that, about his other novels being connected. well i knew about 'all souls' but not the others

thread making me think I shd read this + Machen & Gawsworth links, right?

Just read 'While the Women are Sleeping', his short story collection, because of this thread, as not feeling strong enough atm for a huge trilogy

Really enjoyed it, even if a couple of the stories left me a bit bewildered as to what actually happened.

He has this lovely urbane, witty, charming Spanish thing going on, rather like Alberto Manguel, and sometimes Borges. And a bit like Robert Louis Stevenson (ans the Spanish bit), who I'm pretty sure Borges, Manuel and Marias are big fans of.

Gawsworth MAY show up in a story in While the Women are Sleeping, btw

Gawsworth MAY show up in a story in While the Women are Sleeping, btw

Oh yeah, I just remembered that - through the window of the retail store, I think.

gawsworth is mentioned in all souls, which is proving to be easily the most genuine oxford novel i have yet encountered

All right, all right, I may have to give this guy another chance. Still have a copy of Dark Back of Time, maybe I will reread All Souls first.

Perfectly alright to read Dark Back first, I'd say. That was my first Marias, the one that hooked me.

Doesn't get mentioned much, but The Man Of Feeling is a splendid book. Less bound to digression, more Nabokovian.

All Souls has a scene in which (like A Heart So White, and Your Face Tomorrow too kind of) an interpreter makes up his own questions during an interrogation of some kind; also, like the latter, a disquisition on how the word 'eavesdrop' doesn't exist in Spanish

oh to have time to reread these

Vaster than empires and more slow

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-worldly-digressions-of-javier-marias