Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías

 

Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías

The culmination of a triumph of storytelling

James Lasdun
Sat 21 Nov 2009 00.07 GMT


Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 560pp, Chatto & Windus, £18.99

Part two of Javier Marías's metaphysical epic, Your Face Tomorrow, culminated in one of the more bizarre scenes of recent fiction. Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited into a nameless sub-section of MI6, finds himself in the handicapped lavatory of a glitzy London disco, looking on helplessly as his boss, Bertram Tupra, attacks a young Spanish diplomat with a sword – "a double-edged Landsknecht sword", no less – breaking several of the man's ribs before all but drowning him in the lavatory.

 

Outline by Rachel Cusk review – vignettes from a writing workshop

James Lasdun acclaims a miniature tour de force of human portraiture and storytelling virtuosity

James Lasdun
Wed 3 Sep 2014 16.00 BST

I

n one of many remarkable passages in Rachel Cusk's new novel, the narrator, an English writer who has flown to Athens for a few days to teach a writing workshop, gives a detailed account of her first class, in which she asks each of the 10 students to talk about something they noticed on their way in. It doesn't perhaps sound like the most riveting premise for a scene, and there must be plenty of people in the creative writing business who have resisted doing their own version of it, wary of the risks of literary shop-talk. But Cusk, who has a gift for making the most mundane situations compelling, plunges right in, emerging with a miniature tour de force of human portraiture and storytelling virtuosity.

Hilary Mantel
Photograph by Ray Tang

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher review – Hilary Mantel's new collection

The phenomenal narrative engine of the Cromwell novels only fires in fits and starts in this flawed but absorbing selection

James Lasdun
Wednesday 24 September 2014 12.00 BST

Short stories have a way of turning innocent readers into exacting aestheticians. Their brevity invites us to engage with them as formal structures in a way that novels generally don't. We judge them as artefacts even as we consume them as narrative, and consciously or not, we demand all kinds of contradictory things from them. We want them to feel inventive but uncontrived, lifelike but extraordinary, surprising but inevitable, illuminating but mysterious, resolved but open-ended. It's a tall order, as anyone who has tried to write one will know.

James Lasdun / Houellebecq in the Flesh

Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq in the Flesh

by James Lasdun

For a few moments near the beginning of The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, the novelist (starring as himself) sits glumly passive with a strip of duct tape over his mouth while his three kidnappers get ready to spirit him out of his apartment. It’s a witty image—the compulsive provocateur finally forced to shut up—and not surprisingly it forms the main publicity shot for the movie. What pent-up outrages, you wonder as you look at it, are going to burst forth when the tape comes off?