Interpreter of Malefactors by WYATT MASON

Javier Marías

Interpreter of Malefactors by WYATT MASON

To judge the Spanish novelist and essayist Javier Marías solely on the basis of “Voyage Along the Horizon” would be akin to imagining Flaubert only from “Salammbo” or Nabokov from “Transparent Things.” Though these works aren’t insignificant in their own right, to read them without recourse to their authors’ larger bodies of work is to comprehend a complex organism only from its vestigial limbs.

Published in 1972, when Marías was 21, “Voyage Along the Horizon” is his second novel, and has just made its first appearance in English. In a Marías library that now numbers over two dozen books, “Voyage” cannot be appreciated for what it is without first understanding what it is not: a mature book by one of the most original writers at work today. Marías’s most recent novel, “Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream,” also appears in English for the first time this summer, and it is as accomplished and sui generis as all his mature work.

Often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, Marías is famous (everywhere but here) for the 1992 international best seller “A Heart So White,” a kind of whodunit that hides its metaphysical depths, and for “Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me” (1994), a thriller that turns out to be more of an existential puzzle. These fuzzy thumbnails cannot adequately convey how unusual both books are, since Marías’s considerable worth as a writer resides in the uniqueness of his prose. This risks seeming an insult — on par with complimenting a gentleman’s character by calling our attention to the fineness of his tie. But as Proust once said of true literary style, “like the color sense in some painters, it’s a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no one else sees.”

That’s the trouble with “Voyage Along the Horizon.” Whereas in Marías’s later creations, a reader is traveling in wholly uncharted territory, the universe of “Voyage” is all technique, and borrowed from a half-dozen other writers at that. Marías — forgive him, he was 19 when he began it — meant it as a literary parody, a postcard to the writers he was reading at the time. Like Italo Calvino’s 1979 “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” (a novel about reading a novel called “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”), “Voyage Along the Horizon” revolves around the reading aloud of a novel called “Voyage Along the Horizon,” in which “a large group of illustrious writers and artists from England and France ... embark on a voyage to Antarctica, hoping to produce a literary work and a great musical spectacle based on their experiences at the South Pole.” In form, the novel is Conradian: as in “Heart of Darkness,” an unnamed narrator listens to the story of a voyage centered on a mysterious man. In style, it is Jamesian: long, looping sentences hopscotch from one qualifying clause to the next. In content, the novel is Melvillean, a sea story, albeit staged as if by Agatha Christie. The plot turns on a trifecta most foul — kidnapping, dueling and murder — but the novel is really a seafaring shaggy-dog story where the telling is the tale.

At best, this is amusing; at worst, fatiguing. If you want to care about characters, this is not your book. If you enjoy literary play for its own sake, you might have fun, although Kristina Cordero’s uneven translation sometimes truncates Marías’s long, winding sentences.

If “Voyage Along the Horizon” could have been written by almost anyone (at times, it seems to have been written by everyone), “Your Face Tomorrow,” Marías’s novel in progress, could have been written by no one else. (The first volume, “Fever and Spear,” appeared last year, and Marías is said to be at work on the concluding volume.) Like all his recent novels, “Your Face Tomorrow” is narrated in the first person. A Spaniard, Jacques Deza, is recounting a period in his life when he lived and worked in England as an interpreter for an unnamed shadow agency of the British secret service. Deza began the job during a separation from his wife: a “deepening rift” had formed between them, something Deza did not understand as it was happening. “It is only later on,” he tells us, “that you realize you have lost the trust you had in someone or that others have lost the trust they had in you.”

Deza may have lost trust in his personal life, but it is precisely what he has been hired to gauge in his professional life. During their interrogations of potential terrorists and possible malefactors, his employers depend on him to discern their degree of threat. From the smallest detail (the color, say, of a Venezuelan’s shoes), Deza can deduce whether the man is more likely an elite assassin or a common ass. All too aware of how easily you can reveal yourself without wishing to, or how quickly you can betray your intentions without a word, Deza prefers to remain tight-lipped: “One should never tell anyone anything,” he says in the novel’s first words, an injunction the reader is grateful he violates every chance he gets.

If Proust is right that prose is vision, not whiz-bang effects, consider this example, from “Fever and Spear”: “We do not trust ourselves as witnesses, indeed, we do not trust ourselves at all, we submit everything to a process of translation, we translate our own crystal-clear actions and those translations are not always faithful, thus our actions begin to grow unclear, and ultimately we surrender and give ourselves over to a process of perpetual interpretation, applied even to those things we know to be absolute fact, so that everything drifts, unstable, imprecise, and nothing is ever fixed or definite and everything oscillates before us until the end of time, perhaps it’s because we cannot really stand certainty.”

However verbally fine, the beauty of this passage lies in the precision of the thought: that ultimate understanding of anything is both worth pursuing and beyond attainment. Marías’s is a style of thinking more than writing. In “Your Face Tomorrow” it is faithfully rendered by Margaret Jull Costa, his principal English translator, who achieves a rare feat: presence and near invisibility.

Much of “Fever and Spear” was set in Oxford, late at night and into the following morning, as Deza and the old Oxford don who drew him into the spy game discussed history and human frailty while sipping sherry. But any sense of certainty about where Marías was heading is upended in “Dance and Dream.” Who could have guessed it would involve discotheque toilets, swordplay and Botox?

As Deza reaches the end of the strange, violent centerpiece of “Your Face Tomorrow,” the incongruity of his surroundings intensifies and the hollowness within him deepens. The slow, indefinite revelation of his universe is the most affecting narrative feat in Marías’s work to date. It has a musical lightness that recalls Charles Ives’s “Unanswered Question,” a composition that rises but does not resolve. The reader is left to wonder — and wait to discover — what Marías is thinking, which is to say, where this might be leading. “All it takes,” he tells us cryptically, “is to have behind you some dead beloved person or some beloved person who ceased to be beloved ... or for us to become that for someone else.”

Wyatt Mason is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/books/review/Mason.t.html