The story and everything that sticks to it

It was back in February, I think, that I finished the first volume of Javier Marias's three-volume work Your Face Tomorrow and immediately went to Amazon to order the second volume. Since then I've had five months to wonder who was waiting at the narrator's door on that rainy night, and at one point my Marias withdrawal was so severe that I couldn't stop myself from reading the first volume again.

Now, finally, the second volume has arrived and I am once again suffering from Marias withdrawal. I had intended to read slowly and let the experience last a bit longer, but no: I devoured the whole thing over the weekend, and now I'm eagerly awaiting Volume Three, which isn't even listed on Amazon yet. If I can't read Marias right now, at least I can write about him.

So far the books evince a certain symmetry: Volume One opens with a warning against speaking and Volume Two with a warning against listening; Volume One ends with the narrator in his apartment looking out the window toward the person waiting in the street, while Volume Two ends with the narrator in the street looking up at the window of his apartment. I'm not certain what Marias is suggesting with these structural symmetries or where he will take them in Volume Three.

Marias's prose has been described as Proustian in that any mundane moment may open out into complex webs of interconnected ideas. "[E]verything immediately grows longer or becomes tangled or adhesive, as if every action carries within itself its own prolongation and every phrase leaves a thread of glue hanging in the air, a thread that can never be cut without something else becoming sticky too," he writes in the first part of Volume Two. This stickiness of storytelling extends even to the multiplication of synonyms, as Marias's narrator, a translator, constantly tries out a range of words for each action or idea, as if unwilling to settle on a single word or as if even the entire Thesaurus would be inadequate to express the nuances of meaning he struggles to convey:

Tupra did not tend to talk much about his private life, at least not directly or in narrative form (he very rarely told stories, or even anecdotes; on the other hand, he was more than ready to listen to them), he did so only through vague remarks and hints and occasional comments, which, apparently unintentionally, alluded to past experiences from which he liked to extract laws and deductions, or, rather, inductions and possible rules of behavior and character, or, rather, cast-iron, set-in-stone rules, according to his absorbent and appreciative eyes which could take in at a single glance a whole area or a place packed with people, a restaurant, a disco, a casino, a pool hall, an elegant reception room, the foyer of a grand hotel, a royal function, an opera, a pub, a boxing match, a racetrack and, were it not a flagrant exaggeration, I would even say a football stadium, Chelsea's Stamford Bridge.

If sometimes it feels as if Marias is trying to feed readers the dictionary, it at least it makes a delicious meal.

What all this multiplication of stories within stories covers up is a silence, an absence, something untold but essential hiding behind all the words. In a novel about the dangers of speaking and listening, Marias requires many words even to describe silence:

But the blank page is the best of all, the most eternally believable and the most revealing, precisely because it is never finished, on it there is eternally room for everything, even for denials; and, therefore, what the page might or might not say (because in a world of infinite talk--simultaneous, superimposed, contradictory, constant, exhausting, and inexhaustible--even when a page says nothing, it is saying something) could be believed at any time, not just during its one time to be believed, which, sometimes, lasts no time at all, a day or only a few fatal hours, and at others for a very long time indeed, a century, even several, and then it is not fatal at all because there is no one to check if the belief is true or false, and, besides, no one cares when everything is balanced out.

This passage, in fact, may hold the key to Volume Three. Given Marias's demonstrated desire to put on the page both the story and everything that sticks to it, and given his statement here that only the blank page has room for everything, perhaps Volume Three will consist entirely of blank pages.