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Jan. 21st, 2009 03:38 pmJavier Marias' Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear (first part of a trilogy, or a three-part novel, or however you want to characterize it) is apparently in the running for a multitude of awards, which is why my roommate gave it to me!
So I started reading it, and promptly got bogged down in full-page stream-of-consciousness sentences about three sentences in.
(My thoughts at this point: "man, six months out of school and I have lost the ability to read hardcore literary fiction!")
But I forged on nonetheless, and made it through to the other end, with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, Marias is writing a Book That Deals With Themes and he very much wants you to know it; very little actually happens (in this first section, at least) except a lot of musing on the general untrustworthiness of human beings, the importance of saying nothing that might give you away, the impermanence of human relationships, etc. Also I sort of felt there should be a drinking game for every time that the words "fever and spear" appeared in the text.
On the other hand, as I was reading through, I did occasionally pick up on the flashes of insight, of "yeah, that's right, he nailed it there" that good stream-of-consciousness does. Also, as I got more into the book, I did become continually more intrigued by the creepy-interesting concept - a secret organization set up just to observe people, to infer things from their faces and their movements, to make wild intuitions that turn out to be correct. I can tell that there's some kind of vast conspiracy of not-quite-coincidences being set up here around this organization and the Spanish Civil War, kind of like The Crying of Lot 49, and since it is technically only a third of a book it is probably not fair to judge it on how successfully it has managed to pull all that atmospherically together yet.
So I can see why it's been so praised. And I am glad I read it! (If nothing else, it is reassuring to keep my hand in at super-lit-fic from time to time.) Still, I'm not sure if I'm going to be reading the next two.
So I started reading it, and promptly got bogged down in full-page stream-of-consciousness sentences about three sentences in.
(My thoughts at this point: "man, six months out of school and I have lost the ability to read hardcore literary fiction!")
But I forged on nonetheless, and made it through to the other end, with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, Marias is writing a Book That Deals With Themes and he very much wants you to know it; very little actually happens (in this first section, at least) except a lot of musing on the general untrustworthiness of human beings, the importance of saying nothing that might give you away, the impermanence of human relationships, etc. Also I sort of felt there should be a drinking game for every time that the words "fever and spear" appeared in the text.
On the other hand, as I was reading through, I did occasionally pick up on the flashes of insight, of "yeah, that's right, he nailed it there" that good stream-of-consciousness does. Also, as I got more into the book, I did become continually more intrigued by the creepy-interesting concept - a secret organization set up just to observe people, to infer things from their faces and their movements, to make wild intuitions that turn out to be correct. I can tell that there's some kind of vast conspiracy of not-quite-coincidences being set up here around this organization and the Spanish Civil War, kind of like The Crying of Lot 49, and since it is technically only a third of a book it is probably not fair to judge it on how successfully it has managed to pull all that atmospherically together yet.
So I can see why it's been so praised. And I am glad I read it! (If nothing else, it is reassuring to keep my hand in at super-lit-fic from time to time.) Still, I'm not sure if I'm going to be reading the next two.
