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Episode 12: "Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell"
97 Plays1 year ago
Here it is, folks, our final episode on Your Face Tomorrow and the last part of our Marías project. It's a longer one, but very worth it if we do say so ourselves.
Our next season and new project will kick off in a couple weeks' time, but before that a thank you for listening along. It's a fun project and one we hope folks are getting as much out of as we are (and do let us know what you think and/or what you'd like to see us dive into next!).
So, stay hydrated as we wrap up our time with Deza and his creator, the late, great Javier Marías.
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Lost in Redonda
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi, Lori. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Tom. How are you?
00:00:30
Speaker
I'm doing okay. It is, we were just talking before we got going. Um, it is crazy hot in Chicago, though, from what you're telling me, it's probably about the same temperature in Dallas right now. And that's more of a, more par for the course for y'all perhaps.
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah. Unfortunately, this summer, 105, 106 every day for weeks on end is not unusual, but I don't know. It's getting almost a little boring now to... I feel like everyone I see, everywhere I go, it's like we start talking about the weather and then we're just like, yeah, okay, whatever. This is just the way it is.
00:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Exploring 'Your Face Tomorrow' Volume 3
00:01:11
Speaker
So I think that there's a good weather segue into volume three, but the weather doesn't really come up so much in this one, I don't think, but.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, today we are digging into volume three of Your Face Tomorrow, Poison, Shadow and Farewell. This wraps up Maria's mammoth project published in the early 2000s and wraps up our our project of reading through Maria's work. We didn't cover all of it, but we covered
00:01:46
Speaker
pretty much all of it, I would say. Maybe in the future we can spend some time going through his blog. He kept a blog for a very long time that was updated with some regularity with just thoughts and notes and things. I stumbled across it recently, again, remembering that I used to check it pretty religiously at one point in my life. But
00:02:09
Speaker
So it's still available. It's still it's still up there. Yeah. And even if it wasn't, you probably use like a way back machine to find it. But yeah, just punch in the occasional character name from one of his books and include Javier Marius or something like that. And especially if that character is based off of someone he knew in life, there might be a remembrance of that person that that appears and you get a little bit more of that.
00:02:34
Speaker
that connective tissue. And then obviously he had tons of essays and reviews and the like, but for our purposes, I think we covered what we needed to cover. It feels like we've covered about 93, 94% of all the fiction. I feel that's probably not an exaggeration.
00:02:52
Speaker
I think that's accurate. We didn't dive into the short stories or into his novella, but I think they're incredible. Some of them do feel at times, perhaps like a little bit of not really a rough draft, but an earlier attempt at things that he then
00:03:11
Speaker
Pulled out more in the novels me for instance the doctor taking advantage of Folks on the outside of the Franco government in the 1950s which then got incorporated into this bad begins that sort of thing But always good to have something else to go back to at a later point
00:03:31
Speaker
But yeah, so Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, probably the three clearest titles for various parts of this novel.
Character Deep Dive: Dez and Peter Wheeler
00:03:42
Speaker
What did you think? How did this bit strike you?
00:03:47
Speaker
Well, I think that listeners might recall that I wasn't totally enamored with volume two of Your Face Tomorrow. I really enjoyed volume one. And I would say volume three for me was more in tune with the way I felt about volume one. And part of it is that I just really loved the character of Peter Wheeler.
00:04:11
Speaker
I wouldn't say he's featured prominently in this one, but I feel like the last 150 or so pages is pretty focused on Dez's last few interactions with Peter Wheeler. And we had, thankfully, although to my dismay he still shows up, much less De La Garza in this one, which was a relief to me.
00:04:39
Speaker
But one of the more unexpected things and fascinating things for me was this new kind of theme that I don't recall ever really seeing in the Moreus fiction that we've read before.
The Kennedy Mansfield Complex Explained
00:04:57
Speaker
Kennedy Mansfield Complex, which was rather fascinating. And I don't know, Tom, should we maybe start there since that is kind of treated in the beginning of this book and kind of flows through. And it's a really interesting idea. Yeah. It's a term of art used in Tupper's organization. Was it Mulrion that came up with it? I think that was... I think so, yes.
00:05:26
Speaker
And initially it sounded like it might've been just called the Kennedy, what have you, but he insisted on Mansfield being included. But basically the idea is that the circumstances of your death overshadowing and overwriting everything else that you've accomplished in your life, especially for people who may otherwise never be noticed in the first place or not much remarked upon that how they died
00:05:55
Speaker
fixes them in time and fixes them in the larger imagination. So it's obviously referencing John F. Kennedy, whom Cooper said would have been remembered no matter what because of who he was, but that he died the way he did ensures that he is one of the first people someone would think of when they think of a president of the United States. They'll think of Kennedy simply because of his death.
Legacy and Memory: Historical Perspectives
00:06:20
Speaker
And Jane Mansfield, an actress who I mean, they list off some of the her first, including being the first like fully nude or bare chested Hollywood star in like in a normal American movie, which is just that's great. That's one way to one thing to remember her for, I suppose. But in her death, she
00:06:45
Speaker
became fixed in time. She died in a traffic accident in Louisiana in 1964 or so. Basically, the car she was traveling in, there was a truck in front of them and it came to a sudden stop and they ran right into it. Three of her children were in the back seat. They got away with nothing but bruises, but the three adults in the front seat, the driver, her lawyer, and possible boyfriend at the time, and Mansfield were all killed instantly.
00:07:15
Speaker
It suggests that it's unclear and I even kind of poked around a little bit. It's not entirely certain, but in the photograph of the scene, there's blonde hair and she was, you know, a noted platinum blonde. There's blonde hair seen to one side, which sparked
00:07:33
Speaker
rumors that she was decapitated in the accident or at the very least scalped. And that's what she's remembered for. And that's why why she still remembered her movie career wasn't sufficient for her to be anything more than a bit of a trivia quiz than anything else. But now because of how she died, she's she's known. So this syndrome or what have you is
00:08:02
Speaker
something that they think about in Tuber's organization with regards to how will people act? Like if there's a possibility that their last great act is what will define them and make them known, where do they go? Where does that person go next? What do they do next? I believe they use the term narrative horror as a way of describing, which is such a good
00:08:26
Speaker
way of describing that uncanny feeling of how am I going to be remembered and is it for the worst thing that I've ever done that I will be remembered? Well, it doesn't even have to be, and I was kind of surprised that they didn't use this example in the book because to me, we'll talk about how it really becomes a real application for DESA
00:08:52
Speaker
and two brought in the book. But this Kennedy Mansfield complex and the whole idea of narrative horror, you know, just kind of how will someone recount a person's life story
00:09:09
Speaker
and I feel like it can also be like a humiliating death like Elvis Presley and I was kind of surprised they didn't bring that up because you know he died in you know if you believe some of this stuff like his colon weighed 40 pounds when he died and all of this kind of
00:09:29
Speaker
salacious detail. But I guess it's true that he died on the toilet. So this wouldn't be the way that you would think one of the most famous performers in American history and therefore in the world's remembrance would want to die. But they also use it in the book to talk about
00:09:58
Speaker
Not so much that you would be embarrassed or ashamed about the circumstances of your death or even that the circumstances of your death would be so extraordinary that they would overshadow your accomplishments in life.
00:10:16
Speaker
But also in the context of the possibility that some people that maybe don't have incredible widespread fame might actually almost want to go out in a really weird way in order to increase their remembrance or their profile in posterity.
00:10:40
Speaker
Did you ever watch the show, Frazier? No. OK, there's a an episode and this is what immediately came to mind when this is first being back when I first read this and rereading it now. There is a scene where Frazier's producer is describing to him the story of Lupe Velez and Lupe Velez wanted to be remembered. So she created this like
00:11:07
Speaker
whole, she planned her suicide and planned it to be this lavish, amazing thing that whoever found her would be so struck by her beauty and how she was laying there and all the thought that she took to do it. And she took the pills to kill herself and then began to have serious stomach trouble from the food that she ate for her last meal.
00:11:28
Speaker
and quickly ran to the bathroom, tripped, fell and died with her head in the toilet. And as a result, she is very much remembered for how she died and gets to be known as a result.
Case Study: Dick Dearlove's Quest for Recognition
00:11:43
Speaker
But yes, I mean, this idea of choosing to go out in a way such that you don't disappear, that you don't go into the
00:11:53
Speaker
into the one-eyed, you know, speechless space that he talks about all the time when he's, when Marius is writing about death. Yeah, this desire to desperately be remembered, which is also reflected, I think, in a careless talk as it comes up once again. The idea that
00:12:14
Speaker
folks are trying are constantly trying to make sure that they are known, they are remembered, and they do have some level of importance. I mean, I think that is something that Maria is pretty consistently concerned with, especially in his later works, how folks want to be known and and remarked upon whether or not that's for
00:12:37
Speaker
good reasons are bad is just the not being forgotten, I think. Well, should we talk? We're going now a little bit out of order in the sequence of the book, but because we're talking about the Kennedy-Mansfield complex, I'm wondering whether we should talk about the case study, so to speak, the person that Tupra assigns Desa to observe this kind of maybe
00:13:06
Speaker
maybe minor singer, musician, music guy, Dick Dearlove. He seems to be known pretty well in some countries, but perhaps he's not quite the megastar that he would hope to be. And Dezza is told that he needs to sit beside this guy at a dinner after one of Dearlove's concerts and kind of do his
00:13:36
Speaker
do his organization thing that Tupra and he and their colleagues do, which is try to interpret someone and predict kind of what they might do in the future.
00:13:48
Speaker
Because Deza is already at this point given a report on Dirov. He'd been in an interview and again presented this idea of narrative horror that Dirov is probably capable of almost anything so long as it serves his needs to be known, to be remembered. Tupra assigns Deza to, again, as you said, sit next to him after this concert.
00:14:15
Speaker
It's a weird conversation. Dear Love is talking with another performer, celebrity, same age as he is, and they're talking about sex and who wants to have sex with them and where, where in the world is better. A lot of it's all about how the
00:14:32
Speaker
what feels like the younger folks in Spain are perfectly happy for him to have sex with them or not very engaged in the act because what they want is to go run off and tell other people that they'd had sex with him. She talks about how she's experienced the same thing except they throw her skirt over her face and how insulting that was at first and then she got why it was the case. It's just this really, really uncomfortable conversation.
00:14:58
Speaker
And coming out of that, Deyza's disgusted by the end. He does tack on this idea to his report that Dirov would do something to continue to be remembered, that he's terrified that his music isn't enough to keep him front of people's minds, that his stars already begun to fade, and that finding a way to continue to be remembered might actually be
00:15:22
Speaker
something of a priority for dear love at this stage of his life. Even to the point of maybe staging some kind of memorable death. Right, exactly. Which is rather what happens.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, how do you want to do this? Do you want to just jump around a bit, kind of hit the points you want to talk about, or do you want to do a quick plot hit? Well, I feel like there's like five different plot lines. I kind of charted it out. You've got the Kennedy Mansfield, Dick Dearlove thing. And then you've got in Kampara with Perez Neusch's father.
00:16:02
Speaker
And then you've got the Manoia video, which is part of the kind of the video nightmare that Chupra makes Deza sit through. And then, of course, you've got the whole Castardo and Louisa and what Deza decides to do, kind of inspired by Chupra. And then you've got, you know, the circumstances of Valerie Wheeler's suicide.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, so it's a little bit, I don't know. I started with the Kennedy Mansfield Complex because that's kind of at the beginning of the book, I guess, and because I said that it was an idea that I hadn't seen him talk about before and I thought it was quite an interesting one.
00:16:45
Speaker
Well, why don't we wrap, why don't we wrap that one and wrap a little bit of a bow around, um, good old Dick dear love. So towards the end of the novel, Deza is coming back from Spain, having had some very interesting adventures while he was home in Madrid.
00:17:00
Speaker
And the newspapers are splashed everywhere with the story of Dick Dierlove, who has murdered a 17 or 18 year old, is unclear of his Bulgarian or Russian kid at his house with a spear, stabbed him in the heart and stabbed him in the throat and is now
00:17:20
Speaker
in custody, this is Dick Dierwove's last great act. And Dezza reads it and is immediately sure that Tupra had some kind of a hand in this, that whatever it is that, and yet he doesn't know why.
00:17:39
Speaker
Earlier in the novel, there's this part of the novel, there's a conversation with Presnuiks where she lays out that, you know, they aren't just working for the state. They're also clearly working for private individuals who have sufficient money to engage these services.
00:17:53
Speaker
When Deza is not immediately able to talk to Tuprah about what took place, he goes to her and she agrees that it's a coincidence and coincidence has happened, but coincidence almost never happens around Tuprah. And that, yeah, he probably did have something to do with this and know the state probably had no interest in this. Why would they care? But someone else might have, someone else might have wanted to figure out a way to make something like this happen.
00:18:18
Speaker
At the very least, that Tubera had played upon this fear of Dick to get him into a state to do this thing is how it kind of came across. And I think that Desa feels very, very guilty because I think that he really believes and he might be right that Tubera was motivated to kind of set Dear Love up to
00:18:47
Speaker
commit this horrible crime because of Des's report after observing and having this weird post-concert discussion with Dear Love and his conclusion that Dear Love was the kind of person and had the kind of psychology that
00:19:11
Speaker
he would do almost anything and go to almost any extremes of behavior in order to just keep his name out there. Right. And this also comes, I mean, it's within the novel and also within the chronology of what's taking place in Deza's life, immediately after he has a conversation with his father. His father is unwell, has had many strokes, has become unstuck in time and is clearly
00:19:41
Speaker
not much longer for the world, but is still capable of the occasional cogent conversation. And one of the things his dad says is the thing I'm proudest of is that no one died because of me. Nothing I said led to someone's death. And then not 10 pages later, Deza is firmly convinced that something he said led very directly to
00:20:05
Speaker
not just the death of dear love's public life because who knows how much you know how long he lives in prison etc but the death of this kid this young man who whatever else his role is he wasn't dick dear love he wasn't the person that was supposed to be like taken off the board as it were and yet that's exactly what what he was used for it's also i've also just to note i think
00:20:32
Speaker
This part of the novel does a really, I think, remarkable job of somewhat twinning Wheeler and Juan Deza.
Parallels Between Juan Deza and Peter Wheeler
00:20:42
Speaker
I mean, they're both in declining health. They're both, they die six months apart. They're both clearly father figures and Deza's, I mean, obviously his father and a paternal figure. And they have,
00:21:01
Speaker
similar in some ways outlooks on the world and how it functions, but have applied themselves to that world in very different ways. Juan Deza did not take up arms in the Civil War, and Wheeler was active in it, and then very active in World War II. I don't know. I think that part is also interesting. There's also just a really remarkable passage where Juan reads
00:21:27
Speaker
He sees Louisa and he sees his son very clearly and just describes him, describes the two of them and their relationship to Deza. Deza remarks that he feels like his father has taken on his role and he has taken on Tupra's role in the office as they're describing what's going to take place next and I don't know. It was very neat and there's also something very sweet about
00:21:54
Speaker
Well, should we talk about Deza Sr's relationship with Louisa? Because it really reminded me in a lot of instances with the relationship between the wife and the father-in-law in A Heart So White.
00:22:16
Speaker
in so far as the father-in-law seemed to be closer and understand the, you know, the daughter-in-law even more so than her husband did. And when you said, like, he sees Louisa as a senior, I think that that's a really good way of saying it because
00:22:43
Speaker
You know, as you said, Desis Sr.
Family Dynamics and Misunderstandings
00:22:47
Speaker
is forgetting things, he's ailing, he's getting weaker every day, but he still seems to have kind of this pretty crystal clear perspective of like where Louisa is in relation to his son and how she's thinking about the marriage
00:23:09
Speaker
And with much more clarity and understanding than it seems that Dezza himself understands, like, is Louisa ever going to come back to me? Is she, you know, what's she doing? You know, is she dating around? Is she serious about someone else? What's she thinking? It is a really nice passage. And there does seem to be something, I think, and perhaps there's more instances than a heart so white, but where
00:23:39
Speaker
Marais depicts these kind of very close relationships between a man's wife and a man's father. I mean, that's certainly the case in Berta Isla. Berta is very close with Tomas' father, especially considering that Tomas disappears from his father's life and isn't there when his father dies. I think it also ties into something that Perez-Newick says towards the beginning of this volume, where I forget the precise circumstance, but Deza
00:24:10
Speaker
Deza makes some comment about himself that she practically laughs at and says, you know, this is the problem with even those of us who can see is that we are very one-eyed when it comes to ourselves. We still have ideas about who we should be or how we present in the world and that impacts our facility. And Juan, Deza at one point
00:24:34
Speaker
just trying to remember the sequencing. But in that same conversation, he comments how semi-known children are to their parents, that you know these creatures so very well when they're young. And as they move out into the world and become adults, they become progressively more mysterious because it's almost like they have too much narrative history.
00:24:58
Speaker
The ability to the ability for some parents to let go of the child that was to see the person who is is difficult is complicated is imperfect at best. So I think I think that's part of it too that he.
00:25:14
Speaker
He has a familial and loving relationship with Louisa, but he also can just look at her as a person separate from being raised by him or his flesh and blood, as it were, and can actually assess in a way that Deza can't even look at Louisa that way and is given cause to wonder if he even really does understand her in some very intimate senses of understanding.
Revelations on Tupra's Organization
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point about Perez-Nuk's kind of talking about the inability to understand or see yourself, because we know from Volume 1 that there's this old file that Dezza looks at, and it's a file about him. And he reads this report. It's not clear who wrote it. He thinks it might be Rylands.
00:26:13
Speaker
That was exactly the observation that was made of him, despite the fact that he's so very good at interpreting and understanding the motivations and the psychology of other people.
00:26:29
Speaker
He pretty much absolutely knows nothing about himself and he's not even interested in knowing himself. I thought that second point was very interesting because it tells us that he's not a self-reflective person very much. I mean, he's kind of going about his job and his familiar duties, having some fun on the side, but yeah, I don't know that
00:26:58
Speaker
I would disagree with what the contents of that report and so far as what Maria's kind of depicts Desa as being, you know, throughout the narrative of the volumes.
00:27:28
Speaker
We should touch on the finishing off the evening at two pros. Well, I think there are two things we should finish off. The evening spent with Perez-Newick's. Just briefly touch on that, because it does have some, it more ties in thematically, I think, than it has any explicit impact on the plot. And it is, as we saw in volume two, much more about Perez-Newick's.
00:27:57
Speaker
If I talk about it this way, I think it sounds clunkier than it actually is. But in some ways, she's kind of downloading information about Tupra, about the workings of the organization, things that Deza hasn't picked up on or thought into the narrative. But so we should wrap that one up. But I think we should also wrap up the evening spent with Tupra in the wake of De La Garza's beating, which can then give us a second to give
00:28:26
Speaker
Give De La Garza all the time he deserves, which is about 30 seconds. I think too, it's important to introduce.
00:28:35
Speaker
that in Kampara guy because I was very affected by the fact that when they're watching those videos, Tupra is saying that, oh, you know, we're just going to hang on to this video of Perez's father getting the shit beat out of him because
00:28:57
Speaker
It might be necessary later on if we need to keep her in the organization, which was kind of that. That was tense. Yeah, that was that was that was two projects. That was a shot across the bow to Deza of like not only am I capable of beating the hell out of that guy you saw me beat up about an hour ago, but I'm also capable of. Black mealing, one of my own, my bet, one of my best people in order to keep them by. Yeah. So, OK.
00:29:27
Speaker
Let's start with Perez-Newick's. The ask finally comes forward, what exactly she wants him to do or more specifics around it. We know that she wants Deza because she's figured out that he's probably the next one to be pulled in to make this reading to not
00:29:48
Speaker
not scare Tupac off. And the person that this is for is basically a loan shark, a front man for a banker that have loaned a lot of money to Perez's father. He's older, sounds like he's always been a bit of a spend thrift and always gotten by on his charm as much as anything else. I think he's a gambler too, isn't he?
00:30:13
Speaker
And he was always a gambler, but now he's gone fully off the rails and owes a lot of people a lot of money. So he took out this loan, wasn't able to pay it back. And the circumstances of how this is all handled are, we don't really need to go into it. It's a lot of back and forth and, oh, you don't understand, but it's this sort of thing that was, frankly, after about the second or third, like cross cut back on it. I'm like, just, can we please move on with this part? Fine.
00:30:39
Speaker
Anyway, there's a guy named Incompara, who is the person that her father has been interacting with, and he is vicious. He will need something, if not money, he will need something to make up the debt and would have no compunctions about beating the ever-wielding shit out of an old man. And so that's what she wants is for Dezad to
00:31:07
Speaker
To do this reading on behalf of a private individual who wants to do business with Incampara but wants to do their due diligence and has hired Tupper's organization to kind of give a sense of, is this guy good to do business with?
00:31:22
Speaker
and clearly it doesn't work because one of the videos, when Tuber says I have some videos I want to show you to Deza, one of the videos shown is of an old man in a pool hall being beaten within an inch of his life, beaten all over his body with pool cues and it's her father. So clearly
00:31:44
Speaker
Clearly whatever in Kampara needed in order not to exact some form of a message by beating up the old man, whatever he needed, he didn't get. And now it's on video, which Chopra mentions. I mean, he, he does do a little bit of a pretty before saying that, you know, it could be used against Perez nukes to keep her that.
00:32:06
Speaker
Her father is the kind of man that would be almost more embarrassed to have it known that this happened to him than to have it had happened to him. And that it's useful, it's useful if they need anything from him as well in the future. And we'll get into why he has all those things, all these videos in a moment. But yeah, I mean, other than the sort of cold-blooded nature of Tubera, I mean,
00:32:34
Speaker
I do feel like the interaction with Perez Newix was threaded through just to be able to give us another perspective or more information about the organization without forcing Deza to actually ask questions. It can just sort of be provided as a sort of data dump. And it's interesting and it's well done, but it does feel
00:32:59
Speaker
It does feel a little weird looking back on it. It does feel a little bit weirder and clunkier than I think you experienced it in the reading of it. Well, particularly because it almost, um, and I know that, that we've mentioned before the fact that, you know, this, this your face tomorrow project was not meant necessarily to be a trilogy. It's just kind of, you know, dividing up into thirds, a big block of a book.
00:33:29
Speaker
But we do get this kind of cliffhanger feeling at the end of volume two. There's this woman in a raincoat with an umbrella in the rain walking a dog, you know, what does she want? Who is she? Finally, you know, the buzzer below rings and it's Perez and she asks if she can come up and then it's just kind of
00:33:54
Speaker
we get a little bit of like the preliminaries they're drinking she's drinking too fast they're smoking she's got her she's got a run in her stocking you know all of those things that we kind of went through with volume two and then it does feel a little bit like oh this is building up to something like
00:34:13
Speaker
really tremendously big. In this volume, we pick up where she goes into telling him a little bit about the history of MI-15, MI-6, and about how after the Cold War, they really couldn't afford to keep all their staff. One of the things that
00:34:34
Speaker
These people who were now kind of semi-unemployed or didn't have enough to do was the organization started doing work for private individuals, private companies that wanted to hire security details or things like that and to get the organization to turn
00:34:54
Speaker
from looking at foreign operatives and foreign operations and international governmental intrigues to just vetting people for private companies. I guess we needed that to kind of get us to why she was asking this favor, why Tupra and the organization were even bothering with in Kampara.
00:35:23
Speaker
I mean, I think also is Maria is dipping his toe into some of the more political elements that I think he does a lot more of and like Berta Isla and Thomas Nevinson. I mean, those are much more. I think those two novels are much more and we talked about this much more explicitly dealing with politics and former relations and the world and the state and his earlier novels didn't really do that. It was much more on the interpersonal level. What?
00:35:52
Speaker
each person owes the other, that sort of thing, against the backdrop of some important historical events. I mean, the Spanish Civil War is never far away in almost any of the novels, maybe the man of feeling, but I'm not sure that guy even knew the Spanish Civil War took place. He seems so disconnected from everything. Man, I don't like that character, as I've discovered. He's your de la Garza. Apparently. Oh, man.
00:36:21
Speaker
shit. He would get along with De La Garza probably. But yeah, I mean, so the pros and nukes bits are very are are interesting. And she's an interesting character. I mean, it's remarked upon by multiple people how she's probably going to she could be the best of all of them better than anyone else has has been at doing the work they do. We were, I believe, made mixed the comment in this volume.
00:36:46
Speaker
And on your point about the cliffhanger bit, I mean, the Presnuiks bits are also kind of used to give a, there's this, there's this like a serial novel feel to how, how this progresses. Each volume does have that cliffhanger, you know, wait till, wait till next month when the next, except it's like wait for two years for when the next one will come out. But yeah, I mean, it's,
00:37:12
Speaker
It's interesting. Those sections are interesting. They're very useful to the novel. And I mean, I remarked on this before we started recording. I don't think there's going to be a point in my life where I do not consider Javier Marias to be one of the great writers I've read and possibly like my favorite novelist. I mean, I'll probably consistently go back to that. I will also say that our project of reading so much of his work
00:37:38
Speaker
I might be Maria Stout for a little bit. It's been a lot of how your is and living inside of his novels and his words for for a few months now. So I I say that to say that there might be a little bit of fatigue creeping in to to some of his narrative ticks and approaches. Yeah. In my commentary, I think that I wouldn't recommend to
00:38:07
Speaker
any friend or someone who would want book recommendations from me to kind of do what we did and just kind of like read these thousands of pages
00:38:23
Speaker
of Maria's narrative in one big gulp over the course of, I don't know what now, four or five months. You do need a palate cleanser for sure. I kind of have some of the fatigue that I think that you're experiencing too, Tom. But getting back to this volume three, one of the things that surprised me and I'm kind of
00:38:53
Speaker
picking up another narrative thread here, is Louisa's love life. And I really did not see this coming. Louisa doesn't play a major role in the previous two volumes. And I wouldn't say she plays a super major role, although I think it's a bigger role in this one than any of the others. But she always seemed to me to be quite a kind of an independent, plucky,
00:39:22
Speaker
a funny, smart, confident person.
00:39:27
Speaker
But man, it goes kind of sideways about midway through this book when it comes to Louisa. Do you want to kind of explain what happens? Sure. So Deza finally returned to Madrid. He's been pulled all around Europe with Tupra and just hadn't made a return trip for quite some time. So he goes back for a couple of weeks and he kind of doesn't let anyone know he's coming because he wants it to be a bit of a surprise.
00:39:55
Speaker
And when he gets back, he finds that Louisa is seeing someone, which, I mean, it's been made pretty clear, I think, in the previous two volumes that he would like to go home. He would like to continue his marriage and to continue to be with Louisa, be in the lives of his children, and that it very much seemed to be her choice and her desire for this end.
00:40:22
Speaker
Can I stop you one second there? Because there's a refrain that happens in all of these volumes. And it's been bugging me a little bit. So I'd be interested to see what your thoughts are. I agree with you that Dez is still in love with Louisa. And he kind of has this imaginary, it's not even a dialogue. He imagines her asking him to come back.
00:40:49
Speaker
And it's always, yeah, it's this come home, come home. And it's always, I misunderstood you. What do you think that means? What do you think that she misunderstood about, about Deza? I'm not sure. I wonder if an element of it is, I mean, it's,
00:41:11
Speaker
He says fairly early on that he never turned whatever this gift is onto her, and that seems like a pretty weird thing for him to do.
00:41:21
Speaker
his ability to see people is a pretty core part of his personality and how he moves for the world. So if he's not, I mean, I don't know, maybe he just didn't engage as much or there's always a remove that she was uncomfortable with when it came to him and how he functioned in their relationship.
00:41:41
Speaker
I'm not sure, I think it's also perhaps part of this idea of Tamara's face that she didn't know what she was going to get next with him and that was not acceptable too.
00:41:57
Speaker
But I think it's also interesting that come home refrain that appears so often and is always in his head is vocalized in this volume. But it's vocalized by Perez Newick's, where she's talking about how he how he is and how she feels like she feels like he could stay and do this job and be a part of the group for as long as he wants, but that he's just waiting. He's waiting to go back to Madrid. He's waiting for someone to tell him to come home. And I would imagine he was
00:42:28
Speaker
in a movie version of this, the look on the actors face plant portraying days out would be one of like, total shock to see his innermost thoughts stated by one of his colleagues. But again, Perez is supposed to be the best. Exactly. And Perez is supposed to be the best. So here we are. All right, so I enter I interrupted your your narrative about desert comes home. Louise is dating.
00:42:54
Speaker
But it's not just that she's dating. He gets the sense that when he calls up to come by that she is trying to avoid seeing him. And so he comes over when she says to come over after she's already left and hangs out with the children and eventually figures out from the babysitter that the babysitter coming was a very last minute thing. And so he decides to stay until Louisa gets home.
00:43:16
Speaker
And when she gets home, she's annoyed he's there. And when she turns to look at him, he can tell that she's tried to use concealer over the fact that she's got a huge black eye. And he starts to worry because she gives him a story about the garage door, which was also what Tupra suggested De La Garza say about what happened to his face, et cetera.
00:43:40
Speaker
And eventually he speaks with Christina, her sister, Louisa's sister, who is also concerned because the man that Louisa is seeing, Custer Doy, who we have met before, has a reputation for women having spent the night with him and then not wanting to talk about it and being quite upset by what took place. So suggesting that he likes to hit women and he really likes to hit women during sex. And
00:44:09
Speaker
Where Christina gets most of her information about KisserDoy from is her friend, Juan Rons. So we have a heart so white, really reappearing, hard. And points for me, I remembered that Rons has a first name and it is Juan.
00:44:27
Speaker
Yeah, I recognize the Ron's name as well. I also recognize a concept that comes up in, and I couldn't remember which book, but this old Anglo-Saxon word to denote a relationship between two people because they've each slept with the same person. And now to Deza's
00:44:56
Speaker
horror like he and this custard or a guy who's a real creep seem to be in that relationship vis-a-vis each other. Yeah. Is it tomorrow in the battle that that comes up in? I kind of feel like it might be just because of he has some thoughts about the relationship with his relationship to the husband of the woman who died in his arms. Yes, I think that is right. Yeah.
00:45:23
Speaker
Man, he really likes to tie things in together. All right, so Deza decides, and he's fairly clear with himself that it isn't solely because, I mean, he decides it's not safe for Luisa or his children to be involved with this custodoia guy. But he's also, I mean, he is self-reflective enough to also know that it's jealousy, that he would hate anyone that Luisa is with because he doesn't want to be out of the picture.
00:45:52
Speaker
So he actually calls Tupra to get Tupra's advice and Tupra's advice is like, I mean, are you calling? Tupra is very much like, are you calling me just to get permission or confirmation or what? Because if that's what you need, yeah, go do what you got to do. And this is like, well, what do you mean by that? And Tupra got impatient, was like, dude, just remove him from the picture and like hangs up on him, basically.
00:46:16
Speaker
So that's what Deza does. He tracks down Kostradoy. He borrows a gun from a friend of his who is a Matador, threatens to shoot him on multiple occasions, cocks the gun two or three times, basically recreates
00:46:33
Speaker
what Tupra did to De La Garza in the bathroom. He makes this massive threat with a lethal weapon, a gun in his skin. Initially he asked for a sword, but the sword that was provided wouldn't have been as useful. And the mad door friend is like, well, I mean, so you're trying to scare someone, right? Well, you want a gun for that. I was like, what is?
00:46:53
Speaker
What is going on here? And I will say, Tuber was right. Seeing the gun did not freak out. Custardoid, the way that seeing a sword may have a gun was a little bit more relatable and a little bit less like, well, it's a gun versus if you pulled out a big broadsword and then be like, well, what is this guy about to do?
00:47:11
Speaker
Batra threatening him with the gun. He goes over to Kosterdoy's fireplace, picks up a poker and destroys the guy's left hand. Kosterdoy, as we know from previous books, is a noted copyist and forager and painter. So he leaves the right hand alone, but he at least three times just smashes this metal poker into the guy's left hand, also uses it to
00:47:37
Speaker
cut his face, some really, frankly, brutal and clear, like, this is what will happen to you. This is what I am capable of. And tells him, you need to disappear. And you also need to disappear right now because Louisa can never make any association with you taking off or you being in bad shape and my having been a Madrid.
00:47:58
Speaker
It's I don't know. What did you think of that scene? It's something it was. It was violent, but it was a little bit amusing, too. And so far as as you said, days it calls super up. It's kind of unimaginable what he thought to pro was going to say. I mean, he knows he's read to pray. He knows what kind of guy to pray to pray is so.
00:48:25
Speaker
You know if if he ever thought that jupro was gonna like take him off of the you know the precipice of violence but maybe he did need the permission but he also kind of
00:48:37
Speaker
employs a lot of the tactics that he saw Tupra use, you know, kind of showing, scaring the living shit out of, of, uh, Custerdoy and, and making sure that he understood that he meant business, you know, when he's done busting up the guy's left arm and gashing his face with the poker.
00:49:00
Speaker
He says, I want you to just remain here for 40 minutes. Don't go anywhere, which is exactly what two virtual de la Garza, you stay in this bathroom and you don't leave until 40 minutes or an hour and then just pretend this never happened. It works. It works in this case, or it seems to.
00:49:24
Speaker
It works to a point because this is where we can quickly just dart back to De La Garza. De La Garza goes to see De La Garza to check in on him and works his way into the embassy through various means, whatever, and finds De La Garza in conversation with Professor Rico. Professor Rico emerges. We're not reading this chronologically, but one more time for us, Professor Rico and his shiny bald head and
00:49:52
Speaker
surly manner re emerges. And De La Garza when he sees Deza because Deza is employing the tactics he's learned from Tupra and Mulrion of how to get into a room without anyone noticing how to be quiet. This is the part of the novel where he becomes a shadow. He shadows Kosterdoy through the Prado.
00:50:12
Speaker
for quite a few rooms at one point. When De La Garza sees Deza, he is terrified. The one thing he wants most in the world is for Deza to disappear from his sight. He never wants to see or think of him again, and we can leave De La Garza there, traumatized,
00:50:30
Speaker
still trying to wrap to a medievalist Spanish professor part of the academy, an absurd, more than somewhat useless person, but also like a traumatized, desperately terrified one.
00:50:45
Speaker
Deza does see Custer Doi one more time at the end of the novel, and Custer Doi gives him a look. And it's interesting. Custer Doi no longer has the mustache he had before. I think he's cut off his ponytail. He looks a little different. So it takes Deza a moment to recognize this new face. But Custer Doi recognizes Deza. And Custer Doi knew from the jump when Deza began the assault.
00:51:08
Speaker
who Deza was, even before he said, keep away from Louisa, et cetera, because he really shoots him this look of loathing, not terror, not fear, but almost a promise of, if I can, I will someday get you back.
00:51:26
Speaker
which also jives with Deza's last conversation with Tupra, where Tupra is like, oh, by the way, how'd that business go in Madrid? Did you take care of it? And Deza goes, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's taken care of, to which Tupra goes, well, God tell you, Jack, if you think it's taken care of, it's not taken care of.
00:51:45
Speaker
So now there's always this lurking consideration of Kosterdoy in the background, capable of ruining his new life with Louisa and the children. Because at the end of the novel, he's back in Madrid. He's got a job again there. He's left the organization over his
00:52:03
Speaker
his feelings about what took place with Dick Dearlove. And he and Louisa are together. They live separately. I mean, it's very similar to the relationship that Berta and Tomas have at the end of that novel. But there is that threat hanging in the air a little bit. And the book even ends with Deza saying that nothing is wrong, nothing bad has happened, which is, I don't know, it's an interesting way to leave it off on.
00:52:31
Speaker
So we talked about the subtitle is poison shadow and farewell. And so the poison, I think, is
00:52:41
Speaker
For me, it was pretty clear it's these films, these records that I think Deza explains it almost like an inoculation that Tupra foiced upon him to kind of ignore him to a certain level of violence because Tupra thinks that Deza's kind of a little bit too squeamish about using violence and doesn't,
00:53:08
Speaker
doesn't want to use it unless it's in self-defense, and Tupra needs to teach Deza a lesson that sometimes, you know, it's absolutely, according to Tupra, necessary. I think it's also a peek behind the curtain of how the organization works, that they have this vast archive of compromising events, whether it's illicit sex, whether it's torture, whether it's executions, that they keep this because it could be of use, and maybe
00:53:37
Speaker
maybe ending one person's life is how we then save thousands down the line. There's a lot of self-justification going on there.
00:53:47
Speaker
In a lot of Tupper's interactions with Deza, it seems like he's trying to break him of what Tupper sees as a naivete, that Deza can see the world and people for what they are. And yet, for whatever reason, in Tupper's mind, he's holding on to these antiquated notions of what's right or what's wrong or what's acceptable or what's not. In Tupper's world, it's all acceptable. It all can be employed. It's all fair game.
00:54:11
Speaker
Yeah. And then the shadow, as you just discussed and described, is Deza shadowing Custerdoy around the Prado and kind of, not pouncing, but surprising De La Garza, who's unaware of his presence while he's just kind of watching him for a while.
00:54:32
Speaker
But maybe we need to get to the farewell, which is a double farewell. He has to say goodbye to his father. But then I think more impactful for the volumes before and this volume as well, perhaps, is that he has to deal with the death of Peter Wheeler, but not before he has some very interesting discussions with Peter Wheeler.
00:54:59
Speaker
The scenes with Peter Wheeler at the end of this novel made me so very sad. It was heartbreaking what came across in the loss of his wife. And this is also true with Juan, his father.
00:55:18
Speaker
very impressive minds who are losing their way at the end and who would always circle back to the point no matter how far afield they went but can no longer remember what the point was or where they bifurcated from such that they can loop back to it.
00:55:39
Speaker
visits Wheeler before he leaves England and just asks him questions point blank. What did you do during the Civil War? What happened to your wife? And Wheeler, who's never told these stories before and is very clear to Deza that this is new information for
00:56:02
Speaker
no one else knows this, kind of happily tells him, gets lost along the way. Desai gently brings him back to the point and details his activities in the Spanish Civil War, which are interesting and actually coincided a little bit with what Juan Desai was accused of, denounced for, interacting with the the Red Dean of Canterbury, but then goes into what led to the suicide of his wife, which
00:56:30
Speaker
I don't know Laurie, you're the one that's been desperate to find out what happened. Why don't you recount that part? Well, it seems that Valerie Wheeler was employed by an organization that she didn't really know the full extent of their activities.
00:56:52
Speaker
It was a British government organization and the whole country and everyone in the government of course was totally, totally mobilized and focused on defeating the Nazis.
00:57:07
Speaker
And she was working for a very ambitious boss who was always trying to think of ways to undermine the Nazi regime through clandestine means.
00:57:23
Speaker
And I think some overt means as well. But it turns out that Valerie had a best friend who lived in Austria when they were girls. And the best friend's sister married this man who was rising in the ranks of the SS. And Valerie tells her boss
00:57:53
Speaker
about this guy and the organization that she works for somehow creates some misinformation or reveals some information about the fact that the Nazi, the husband, was actually, I think, a quarter Jewish.
00:58:12
Speaker
But he had hid his identity and paid to have the papers kind of annulled from his record. Although we also learned from Wheeler's story that these kind of records were never expunged really. It was okay to be a quarter Jewish in theory under the Nazi regime. You didn't have to go to the concentration camp. But you certainly weren't going to be rising
00:58:42
Speaker
elevated in the ranks of the SS. And this secret about this gentleman is revealed through the work of Valerie's organization. And it causes her best friend's sister and children just irreparable harm and really almost, some of them disappear, some of them clearly died.
00:59:09
Speaker
But Valerie gets a letter after the war from her friend, and she hasn't communicated with her. They haven't been able to communicate during the war. And her friend just expresses in this letter, without suspecting Valerie, at least I didn't get the sense that Valerie thought that the friend suspected her, but she just
00:59:29
Speaker
tells the story about this horrible information that was discovered and how the family had suffered because of it. And the friend wonders how or why this information came to light. And Valerie just feels incredible guilt, particularly about the children and the wife, and she commits suicide.
00:59:52
Speaker
Wheeler reflects on that, that, that the letter got to her, that there are so many, I mean, it doesn't explicitly state, but kind of implies like there's so many ways for a letter to get lost and for her never to have seen this kind of brought to mind again, this bad begins and, you know, letters crossing and who reads them, who doesn't and how they act upon them. But, um, it's, and it's still apparent from Wheeler's heartbreak.
01:00:17
Speaker
that the night that she killed herself was the night that he fell asleep. She was still awake and he fell asleep even though he knew those hours that she was awake so late were the most dangerous and he wakes up and she's not there and he walks to the stairs and calls her name and she's at the top of the stairs precisely where Deza had cleaned the blood after the party.
01:00:37
Speaker
And when he calls her name. He hears the explosion her body goes backwards and she shot herself in the heart. Mrs. Barry the housekeeper later writes days a letter after. After we were his death to say that to forestall his concern that he'd witnessed a supernatural event that we were.
01:00:57
Speaker
He died of a pulmonary embolism, but that he'd been coughing up blood for some time. And so it was entirely possible that as he walked up the stairs, he breathed out heavily and some blood came out the same time. And that that is what days I cleaned. And that is why both she and Wheeler had kind of pretended like it hadn't happened because Wheeler was pretending like he wasn't. We were never got diagnosed. He was acting as though he wasn't dying. Yeah. And that blood stain.
01:01:24
Speaker
becomes a powerful metaphor throughout these three volumes because Adeza is constantly thinking about things that just resist denial or never go away. And he talks about, you know, just like the outside rim of a blood stain, it's always the hardest to remove when you're trying to clean it. And that just keeps coming back again and again.
01:01:52
Speaker
I mean, it's interesting, he does do a little bit of Henry V in this volume, but there aren't as many explicit Shakespeare references as there are in the others, though clearly the outdamned spot. It's more that he uses metaphor versus explicit reference in this novel than he does in some of the others.
01:02:15
Speaker
No, I mean, Wheeler's story is it's heartbreaking. And it's it's also the idea. I mean, it cuts again to loose lips. And even though what Valerie suggested was in support of the war and undermining morale and all those things and increasing suspicion within the SS ranks, the consequences of it, which were far beyond what she would have imagined, were terrible and something that she felt
01:02:41
Speaker
she felt she couldn't live with. There's also an interesting comment early, like at one point in that conversation where Wheeler kind of describes Deza and he references the report that he read and asked Wheeler if Wheeler was the one that wrote it, to which Wheeler goes, oh, no, I never wrote anything down. Wheeler only spoke. And then suggested that it was Rylands that actually written it, that he was his first sponsor, as it were.
01:03:14
Speaker
I think this is probably a good point to kind of hit on the novel as a whole and kind of where we place it or how we feel about it in a way, but also kind of the project that we're wrapping up here before we do a new one.
01:03:33
Speaker
So yeah, um, thoughts. Uh, I think we both have a lot about, um, this, this novel. So let's start with the novel and then we can move on to the project as a whole. So your thoughts on, uh, your face tomorrow. Well, we kind of shared some impressions before we started recording today.
01:03:52
Speaker
For me, Tom, I had read, as I think I explained to you, volume one about a year and a half ago. I'd never read volume two or three until this month. So pretty intensive reading of all three volumes because I reread volume one as well.
01:04:15
Speaker
This feels like the most Marais of Marais novels. It's almost quintessential like Uber too much Marais and I say that as someone who loves Marais and although I didn't get hooked on him nearly as early as you did because I didn't start my
01:04:38
Speaker
career in in books until 2017 which I think is when I read his first the first book of his that I read I've anticipated Every new novel that he had coming out You know until he died and I went back and read the old ones before we started this podcast. I think that
01:05:00
Speaker
This almost feels a little bit too intensely circular and, dare I say, redundant in some ways. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of momentum. It's a much longer work than the earlier novels that come before it.
01:05:23
Speaker
And it's longer than the works that come after it, too. But there are some chunky novels that come after this one, as we know. But I feel like they kind of move a little bit more effectively. I, again, I've already acknowledged some fatigue.
01:05:42
Speaker
I still really love this novel. I really think it is something of a summation of what he'd been doing in the novels that led up to it. Certainly this idea of letting
01:05:55
Speaker
letting the mind and letting time move at its own pace is absolutely an overriding theme in how it's constructed. And maybe it's just because I've read so much more since the first time around that I read this. I do think that sort of serial quality to it and the fact that maybe it's an effect of the way it was published, it does kind of make it feel a little
01:06:22
Speaker
stodgy. It does slow it down in some respects. If published as a single volume or all at once, instead of being 1,250 pages, I could see it being like a 900-page thing with a lot of the circling back cut out because it'd just be more of a streamlined whole. Or maybe not. Maybe actually have been even longer.
01:06:45
Speaker
someone had to edit the whole thing at once versus head edit it in chunks. I don't know. In some respects, I guess I view it as something a little bit separate from the rest of his work. I don't think it fits in with either
01:07:01
Speaker
As much as it is a summation of the earlier novels, it's also doing some different things. It's also just a different kind of animal and it doesn't really fit in with the others. I think it kind of exists separately. I don't know if it's his best novel.
01:07:16
Speaker
Obviously, I have an incredible affection for a heart so light, and thus bad begins. And I've, hopefully, mea culpla'd my way through my not appreciating this, that the bad begins earlier. It's just a very different animal in my mind. And maybe that's a cop-out. But yeah, I like it. I like
01:07:36
Speaker
I think that it is doing so much work thematically. It is playing with so many things. I think it also is really starting to open up what comes next. And Thus Bad Begins, Inverte Isla and Thomas Nevinson, not as much in the infatuations, but somewhat in terms of the
01:07:54
Speaker
the political dimensions that he starts to get into in his later career. I think that's really kicking off here harder than I think in some ways the merging of those two things. His Marius living inside the head of the characters so thoroughly and circling back around and around in a spiral with the political dimensions may not be a great fit, but
01:08:22
Speaker
I think it's pretty neat at the same time and neat to see him work his way through. And thinking about my, I'll call it mild dissatisfaction with your face tomorrow, and I'm talking about the entire three volumes, I would say that I don't
01:08:44
Speaker
I don't really like the way that Tupra seems to me to be quite undeveloped as a character. It's not just that I don't understand him, it's that I didn't think he was terribly interesting. And then Deza almost just feels like a cipher to me, insofar as we are just getting his reactions
01:09:12
Speaker
to outside influences, circumstances that he's involved in, things that happen to him, what people say to him. But how is he really internalizing these things? Of course, we know that the tupra sword fight with De La Garza seems to have had an impact because we can see
01:09:34
Speaker
you know, very strong echoes of that in the way that Dezza disposed or did not dispose of Castadori. But I think that, yeah, I would have liked to have kind of understood a little bit more about what is going on inside of Dezza's head, I think. But in a way that seems so ironic and contradictory to me because there's so much kind of musing
01:10:04
Speaker
in this book, but Daisy's musings and thoughts seem to have an emotional deadness to them that, for instance, in, I think my favorite, Thus Bad Begins, those people and characters felt very much alive to me because I could feel their feelings. I could feel the emotions.
01:10:28
Speaker
you know i don't dislike days out like i kind of disliked super but i just um i don't know my making sense
01:10:36
Speaker
You are making sense. Quickly on the Tupper point, I think it's interesting. We spend so much time with Tupper here that in Tupper's later appearances, he's much more interesting because there's almost an element of mystery about him. He's all shadows and angles. You don't know who he is at any given moment. And chronologically, in terms of Maurice's work, this is the big introduction of Tupper. And by the end of it,
01:11:02
Speaker
While he's dangerous in a lot of respects and highly competent, he also comes across as a bit of a functionary, right? And I mean, in some ways, I think that might be part of Maria's point, especially when it comes to people who perpetrate violence on the part of the state, Minoia included, that they are
01:11:20
Speaker
they're scary, but they're also just sort of like bureaucrats. And that's not as engaging or interesting. Whereas the spy master type tupra we see in Berta Isla and Thomas Nevinson, while the bureaucrat shows up quite a bit, is far more interesting as a foil or a counterpoint versus a copilot as he seems to be in this one. I do also think that
01:11:46
Speaker
I mean Deza is drifting, and when we first meet him, it's in all souls.
01:11:52
Speaker
And he's drifting through that novel. Like he's just sort of in this liminal space, right? Like it's just sort of a cesra in his life, his time in Oxford. And now he's back in England and kind of existing again in that liminal space. He's not married, but he's not divorced. He's working for this nebulous organization that has no name, doing a very ambivalent job, like ambivalent in terms of what it actually is, ambivalent in terms of what his skills that he brings to bear are.
01:12:22
Speaker
But by the end of the novel, I think, and this shows up when he's saying goodbye to Louisa as he's about to fly back to London, having handled Custer Doyle. He is in the apartment when Custer Doyle calls Louisa to say that he has to take off unexpectedly so that she doesn't see that he's all jacked up and all those things. And he's reflecting on something that, and this is all obviously thinking back on it, but
01:12:48
Speaker
At one point in conversation with his sister-in-law Christina, Christina says, this isn't the Jamie I know. He's let Christina in on the fact that Casterdoy has been removed, but won't tell her what he did. So she says, this isn't the Jamie I know. And his reply is, no, I'm not. I am more myself. And this is
01:13:11
Speaker
I think at the end of the novel, Desa has made a choice. He's an active participant. He's not just reading people and seeing things. He's actually engaging in his life and in the life that he wants and the world that he wants to be a part of.
01:13:35
Speaker
That's kind of where I guess I'm planning on him at this moment, that there is a marked change by the like he has changed by the end of the novel. I think there's a fair point. I mean, through, I don't know, 800 pages, he's in limbo. He's waiting. He's living this life. But he's really just waiting for Louisa to say, come home, come home. I misunderstood you.
01:13:59
Speaker
Now, whether or not, now that he is back home at the end of Volume 3, whether he isn't still going to be waiting, because I think that I didn't get any sense, at least in my reading of it, that Louisa necessarily was ready to take him back. In fact, he says that she wants to continue living in separate homes.
01:14:21
Speaker
kind of swapping custody with the kids. So he's physically back in Spain, and he's closer to his family. I don't know. I guess I wanted to see a little more fire
01:14:36
Speaker
in his thoughts, and maybe that's unfair because maybe he's just not an emotive kind of guy. We know he's angry as hell that Custer Doy is beating the shit out of Louisa, and he does after kind of a
01:14:53
Speaker
deliberative, measured, let me call Tooper to see if this is okay. He beats the shit out of Kosterdoy's hand and rips up his face, but I wouldn't call that at all an act of passion. I mean, it was more kind of like a premeditated, I got to do what Tooper did to De La Garza, which is scare the living hell out of this guy so that he'll do what I want him to do.
01:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, it is. You're quite correct. It is not a passionate. It is cold and methodical, calculating exactly how much violence is the right level of violence. And to be frank, he probably got the level wrong because Kosterdoy isn't terrified of them. He's just more pissed and fearful, but also like plotting. And it's also a question of
01:15:39
Speaker
If he'd done that to De La Garza, De La Garza would still be terrified. It's a question of knowing that the person that you're doing that to, what is the level that's necessary to actually instill that? Which I think Tupra probably would have thought, and probably correctly, there is no level. You just kill him. You take him off the board completely if you want him gone in this particular instance. But Deza doesn't have that level of experience or capacity, perhaps, to do that sort of thing.
01:16:08
Speaker
No, I mean, you're right. He is. He is. He is oddly devoid of emotion and in a lot of respects and very mechanical in terms of how and even when even he knows that he and Perez Newick's are about to have sex at the end of that evening, it's sex is often portrayed as this very.
01:16:27
Speaker
mechanical thing in Marius's work. Two exceptions being at the end of The Spabbagans, that fling seems a little more passionate, a little more engaged. And also in this one, one of the snuff tapes, so it's not a snuff tape, that he views is of a morally upright, crusading MP, female MP, who is seen having a threesome
01:16:55
Speaker
And it sounds like everyone's actually having a good time, which a lot of the sex in Maria's doesn't sound like anyone's having an especially good time. I have to say, I thought that the dad in a heart so white had a lot of I loved that character because
01:17:11
Speaker
I mean, he's done some really horrible things, but I felt as though he, I think he did really at the beginning have a real wild passion for that first wife that he then ends up, you know,
01:17:30
Speaker
Killing um but but he felt like a real hot-blooded person and I guess I guess that that the men in Maybe with the exception of my favorite guy wheeler all these guys seem to be just really just passionate
01:17:48
Speaker
And I think there's one other favorite person that we should definitely quickly bring up, which is the dancing man who doesn't actually show up in this one, except that Custer Doi reminds Deza of the dancing man, which is when Deza knows he can't kill him because he's just, he's too much like this guy that he has a fondness for. So instead I'm just going to destroy your hand. The dancing man has some passion to him, I think.
01:18:12
Speaker
Yeah. And also the dancing man, you're right, doesn't come up in volume three until like, you know, the last 75 pages and only then it's just like the quickest reference. As you said, it's not, we don't see desert looking at the dancing man again, or, you know, looking out his window and dancing with him or anything like that. But yeah, that is an interesting
01:18:35
Speaker
comparison about Custer Doi reminding him of the dancing man. There's one other thing and I don't want to go too over time here, but I thought it was really interesting that Wheeler before he dies, it's not like his last dying words or anything, but in one of their very lengthy conversations, he tells Deza that you and Tupac really aren't that much unlike each other. You, Deza, might
01:19:01
Speaker
want to think that you're nothing like Tubera, but you're actually quite a lot of lake. And I thought that was a very, that gave me pause for a little while. I think that also kind of came up in volume two with like who is capable of killing and who is not. And it's pretty clear that Deza is in the camp of capable and he was capable up until
01:19:25
Speaker
the moment that he thought of the dancing man of killing Koster Dei in that moment, if that was what was the best choice. And certainly, Tupra is as well. Yeah, and there is also perhaps some of the blood, the bloodlessness of it or the mechanical nature of some of the thought processes. There are times where Deza feels like a reading machine, like a seeing machine more than a person.
01:19:48
Speaker
bringing everything that he knows and everything he's learned to bear just to be able to see this person in all their particularities and possibilities. So yeah. I guess looking back at our intensive reading project here, I am certainly happy that I read Your Face Tomorrow. I don't think that it's a book that it
01:20:12
Speaker
the three volumes are something that you that you need to read not only or just if you're a mereus completist i mean you really need to read them if you've got much of an interest at all in mereus i i think but
01:20:29
Speaker
For people coming into my bookstore and who've never read Marais, I certainly wouldn't ever have them start with Your Face Tomorrow. And I think that I would even say, if you're only going to read one or two Marais novels, don't even read Your Face Tomorrow. I would probably pick
01:20:47
Speaker
I would pick this bad began surprise, surprise. I would pick a heart so white. I might pick the infatuations. But yeah, this one this one doesn't even make my my top three, four or five. I don't think I mean, I think it is such a it is a it is a bit of a beast. I think it's also just such a I think there's a lot going on here in terms of where things stood at the turn of the millennium.
01:21:14
Speaker
in culture and how people viewed things, connections to the past, long forgotten wars that still have impact to that day. I think there's a lot going on there that we haven't ever really touched on because it's not really like what our interest is, that you could mine and really do a lot with. Were I to tell someone the two Maria's novels they should read, I would tell them to start with All Souls because I think that's just such a great way to get into his
01:21:44
Speaker
style and his thought process and his sense of humor.
01:21:48
Speaker
And then, yeah, it would either be Heart So White or Thus Bad Begins, depending upon their flavor, what they might be engaged in. I think there's a lot going on in his overall writing project that's kind of muddy at times in terms of how he sees the world and how he sees things and what he's pulling into play. And I think that's part of what makes this one a little weird and a little muddy in some respects.
01:22:17
Speaker
But I also think that as sort of a wrapping up of what a great novelist had been up to, up to that point in his career, there's a lot to recommend it to. So I guess I would say someone should read All Souls, Heart So White, Thus Bad Begins, and then if they're still on board to give volume one a try. And I think, I think
01:22:42
Speaker
Also, what is weird about this novel is that volume one is so recognizably Maria's and so recognizable and has such momentum to it that when it gets muddier as it goes, it hurts it. Volume one is volume one could be a novel by itself. Volumes two and three require everything that came before. And that's tricky when it comes to maintaining narrative and momentum, I think.
01:23:10
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. But it's been really wonderful reading all of these with you, Tom, and talking about them. And I feel like we probably gave a lot of spoilers to all of these novels that when we were talking about them. But the writing isn't necessarily of a type that, you know,
01:23:33
Speaker
It's like linear plot lines or things like that. As we've described, a lot of circling back and circling around and going one way and then taking another narrative thread. It's a complicated way I can imagine to write.
01:23:55
Speaker
Well, I mean, what an incredible author. Certainly, Marais is one of my top five contemporary authors of all time, I think, just because of the body of work and how it's just consistently really excellent.
01:24:14
Speaker
Yeah. Um, if you're reading Maria's for plot, I mean, the plots are good, but that's not why you should be reading Maria's. So yeah, this has been fun and I'm looking forward to our next project, which we'll announce soon. But after this episode goes up, we are going to take a little bit of a break, like a week, maybe two, no more than that.
01:24:32
Speaker
And then we'll be back with some backlist, uh, which we haven't done for about a month now. And, um, yeah, backlist, uh, the new project and yeah, this has been really fun and I'm looking forward to, uh, to season two as, uh, we should probably start referring to it. Yeah. Take care, Tom. Bye Lori.