Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream

A book unlike any other, a daring experiential unfolding Spanish masterpiece, Your Face Tomorrow now leaps into uncharted new territory in Volume Two: Dance and Dream.

Library Journal

Translator, novelist, and recently elected member of the Royal Spanish Academy, Mar as continues where he left off in the first volume of his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Fever and Spear). Virtually the entire action, if you can call it that, takes place in a disco: the main character, Jacques Deza, expatriated in England away from his wife and now employed in the British intelligence service, works as a toady to his spy boss who beats up the attach De la Garza in a rest room for the handicapped having insulted the wife of one of the guests. The slow, plodding, and internal narration not unlike the cerebral style of Mar as's mentor, Juan Benet (1927-93) belies the promotion of this work as a spy novel. Yet the density is offset by some brilliant touches of humor, like the descriptions of the cementlike cones of Mrs. Manoia's breasts. The methods used in the fight parody the revenge strategies used in carrying out the traditional Spanish honor code. As in the first volume, Mar as resuscitates the bitter nightmares of the Spanish Civil War. Mar as is definitely one of the most gifted writers writing in Spanish today, and this work certainly corroborates that reputation; however, those who haven't read the first volume will be lost here and may not fully appreciate the characters and finer points of the text. Otherwise, highly recommended. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

Margaret Jull Costa won both the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the 2008 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Eca de Queiros’s The Maias. She is also the translator of the work of Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, António

Lobo Antunes, and Javier Marías.