The unreliable narrator

There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another.

There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another. Vastly ambitious, densely intelligent, profoundly inquisitive, these works demand from the reader constant attention and unlimited patience to make out the images reflected in what Broch called the ‘dark mirror’ of fiction. Unlike Proust’s monumental Recherche, into which the reader can wander and stay to converse with a particular character or linger in one of its many rooms, Musil and Broch’s constructions are not meant for comparative reminiscences. Neither is Javier Marías’ magnum opus, the trilogy entitled Your Face Tomorrow, whose third and final volume, Poison, Shadow and Farewell, has at last appeared in English, in an impeccable translation by Margaret Jull Costa.

Superficially, Your Face Tomorrow is a tale of spies and spying. Jacques Deza, the protagonist of an earlier Marías novel, All Souls, began the present trilogy by being recruited for the British Secret Service by the Oxford don Peter Wheeler and by a shady character called Tupra, thanks to his uncanny ability to foretell a person’s behaviour by looking at the face. After a number of unfinished adventures punctuated by lengthy dialogues and reflections, Deza reaches the novel’s third volume where he must confront the essentially violent doctrine of the Secret Service world, ruled by the law of ‘every man for himself.’

The reality [Tupra tells Deza] is that we’re doing violence to ourselves by not following and obeying it at all times and in all circumstances, but even so we apply that law far more often than we acknowledge, but surreptitiously, under cover of a thin veneer of civility.