Y así se cierra, poco más o menos, Fiebre y lanza, el primer tomo de la trilogía. Marías presenta a unos pocos personajes y esboza el escenario que servirá de fondo para lo que está por venir. El resto lo forman las ya características digresiones con las que el autor convierte simples historias en lecturas inolvidables. Largos paréntesis proustianos acerca de la palabra y el silencio, la traición y la lealtad, pero también el tiempo, la muerte —y el infinito diálogo entre los vivos y los muertos—, la certeza o el miedo que me han recordado por qué Marías fue durante tantos años mi escritor favorito. The first person narrator is Jacques Deza, a Spanish translator who has separated from his wife (Luisa) and two children, and who, at the beginning of the novel, works for the BBC, and later works as a translator for a British intelligence agency. Marías is a deeply necessary writer, a crusader, funny, pungent, full of wrath and love. These novels will cajole and, if necessary, frighten you into remembering that whatever government and television want you to think, we do owe it to everyone who has lived, and will live, to master ourselves: "The really interesting and difficult thing is to continue: to continue thinking and to continue looking when you have the feeling that there is no more to think and no more to see, that to continue would be a waste of time. In that wasted time lies the truly important."

Spybrary's man in Station L (Northern Sector) author Andy Onyx slipped us this brush pass review of Javier Marias‘s thriller Your Face Tomorrow: Fever And Spear Javier Marias ile böyle görkemli bir tanışmayı hayal etmiyordum. Evet seveceğimden emindim ancak bu denlisini beklemiyordum. Öncelikle söylenmesi gereken şey şu: Bir başlangıç, bir son, bol olay var sanıyorsanız; yanılıyorsunuz. bu kitaba başlayacaksanız kesinlikle serinin en azından 2. kitabını elinizin altında bulundurun. ben kitabın ilk 100 sayfasını okuduktan sonra kitabın çok heyecanlı bir yerde biteceğini fark ettim ama aksiyon almam için çok geçti artık kfgddsjHoy se detesta la certidumbre: eso empezó como moda, quedaba bien ir contra ellas, los simples las metieron en el mismo saco que a los dogmas y las doctrinas, los muy ramplones (y hubo entre ellos intelectuales), como si todo fueran sinónimos. I should say that it took me a while to succumb to its charms. There isn't much of the instantly gratifying, high-gloss surface detail by which novels in the more empirical Anglo-American tradition ingratiate themselves with their readers. Nor is there much attempt to differentiate characters in terms of how they speak or think (odd, perhaps, in a book that consists largely of people talking or thinking out loud). And the ratio of action to abstract speculation feels rather low at times, especially in the first volume, where the ruminative passages often seem to expand more by repetition and tautology than the actual development of a thought. But as the work proceeds and the wonderfully macabre dramas begin to fill out the large intellectual frameworks, and all the recurring motifs – the mysterious drop of blood Deza finds at the top of a staircase, for example, or the notion he calls "narrative horror" whereby a famous life such as JFK's or Jayne Mansfield's is overshadowed by an infamous death – begin to release their implications, so one becomes increasingly aware of the book's immense boldness and originality. El padre de Deza, traicionado por su mejor amigo días después del final de la Guerra Civil y represaliado durante décadas, eligió confiar, no ver, no saber; no por ignorancia o dificultad, sino porque saber abría la puerta a un mundo demasiado terrible; desconfiando antes de ser traicionado se condenaba a sí mismo a una vida entera de desconfianza; tratando de vengarse después hubiera supuesto prolongar la traición y darle la razón al delator.

Kitabın başında sizi hiç bilmediğiniz bir şeye hazırladığı ilk birkaç bölüm hayatımda okuduğum en iyi girişlerden biriydi. In the past he has studied literature and taught Spanish literature at Oxford, and his contemporary peers have been Professors of Spanish or English Literature there (Peter Wheeler and Toby Rylands, the latter now deceased).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 ? Marias jumps in right away through his main character Deza, can the truth be derived at from the gathering of facts rather than the circumlocutions of impressions. Does one, after memorizing all the detail and facts of a painting, aware of each brushstroke and its assimilation into the overall painting before us, capture the painting, its essence? A problem with this mode of viewing a painting is that it exists then only in the past or a presumptive future when the past will be recounted. Wordy and in no rush to move ahead, Fever and Spear isn't your typical spy-thriller, but what there is is tantalizing enough. Marías dissects most delicately the fine membranes that separate the arguably justifiable wars of the 20th century from the farragos in which we now find ourselves enmeshed, if only as the payers of tax and viewers of television. This is another thing that makes the one-to-one account of the atrocities known to Jaime's father the more humbling and chilling: though Jaime leads his life sceptical of any "fact", it dawns on him that recounting cannot really be stopped. Fever and Spear is a meditative novel, with Deza (and also Wheeler) extemporising at considerable length on matters such as trust and silence and the dangers of any communication.