Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear Book

A difficult yet very rewarding read. It took me so many days to finish this. I thought it would only take me around 10 days to finish this book but it dragged on to almost a month. The reason? The frequent appearance of beautiful passages that I have to stop reading and think through them. Pause. Think of what Marias is saying. Do a self-reflection. More often than not, whenever I do a self-reflection at night, I have to close my tired eyes. Then because I've been reading a lot, it is very hard to open them again. So, I sleep even just after reading a few pages of this book, my second by my new favorite Spanish author, Javier Marias.

Before writing this review, I read all the existing ones by my GR friends. I thought that I wanted to show my gratitude to Javier Marias by coming up with a clever review to entice my other GR friends to read this too. I thought I would go over each of the many dogeared pages where all those beautiful passages appear. Read them all again and pick maybe 2-3 and blockquote them in italics in this review. If I was not satisfied, maybe I would also go and read what the literary critics wrote in The New York Times, Guardian, etc and steal some ideas from them.

But I changed my mind. Why? I have been doing all of those for 3 years now and with 1,713 friends in Goodreads, I would like to believe that I was already able to establish some credibility with those of you who regularly read (and like) my reviews. I have always tried to be honest. If the book is not good, then I rate it with 1 or 2 stars. If the book is good, I rate it with at least 3 stars.

So, just take my word for this book: brilliant.

Why only 4 and not 5 stars? This has been mentioned by some of my GR friends: the plot is thin but what makes this really interesting, aside from those beautiful thought-provoking passages is the unique way Marias told the tale of Jacques Deza who, like his boss, Peter Wheeler, has the ability of reading people by just observing them - facial expressions, things they say, how they say them, mannerisms, reactions to questions, etc. Then during those verbal exchanges were thoughts that just went on and on striking any topics under the sun. However, those topics were beautifully tackled by Marias' prose that, like what I already explained above, could make you stop reading because you'd like to savor them.

Beautiful first third of the book. I am looking forward to the second and final thirds.

Marias for a Nobel prize? Considering this and my first by him (All Souls)? I not a bit surprised if some people think he's a big contender.