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Something Different: Javier Marias and Leonid Tsypkin

Wednesday, Nov 20, 2013 at 2:47pm

JAVIER MARIAS
Javier Marias' name is rarely mentioned without the possibility of a future Nobel Prize win being brought up soon after. Roberto Bolaņo called him "by far Spain's best writer today." So why is his name so obscure in North America? Anyone I know who has read him becomes a devoted follower and waits impatiently for the next book. Marias' work is unusual in that the novels aren't so much about what happens, although plenty may happen, but what is caused by those events. Two of his favourite themes are espionage and translation, and so not surprisingly miscommunications, misunderstandings, and questions of identity are often explored in his novels. Both spies and translators, along with a dose of the Spanish Civil War, are at play in what is probably his masterpiece, the three part trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, made up of the novels Fever and Spear, Dance and Dream, and Poison, Shadow, and Farewell. However, his latest novel, Infatuations, does not involve spies or translators. Nevertheless it explores similar possibilities for multiple perspectives and meanings that inhabit the space in between people. Not wanting to give too much away, let's just say that people meet, a man is killed, and then Marias teases out, sentence by sentence, how they respond. He is a master at dropping a metaphorical stone in the water and then playing out the subtle emotional and psychological ripples that result. I recommend him very highly.
   —written by co-owner Chris Hall


LEONID TSYPKIN
Tsypkin worked as a pathologist in Soviet Russia. He was not considered a writer, merely indulging in the art after dark. There were no attempts at publishing the work in his own country. The narrative was too absurd and his accusations against the government too overt. Abandoning all hopes of publication, Tsypkin granted himself the ultimate freedom: to write and reach the centre. And the untimely centre is where he died. Luckily, his work survived with his son and was finally published twenty years after his death.

Mary Ruefle declares, "in the worst windstorms only the most delicate things survive." And how profoundly fragile these things are. Tsypkin's novel Summer in Baden-Baden is unlike anything I have ever read. He shatters all that I have learned about writing, personal and collective history. The novel opens with the narrator travelling to Leningrad by train to visit his aunt. In tandem, Fyodor and Anna Dostoevsky are departing for Germany. The narrator, a man twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union, and Fyodor, the exiled writer, seem to share the same platform, a matching psychological interior. The narrator is dancing on the tightrope to infinity; he is Leonid and Fyodor and me and everybody that has ever dared to stick their head out of a window. The English translation of The Bridge over the Neroch and Other Works was released in early 2013. This collection appears to hold the last of his writing. With this last I too hope to reach the centre.
   —written by bookseller Noor Bhangu


This article was adapted from the September/October edition of our newsletter, The Bookseller. You can access the full newsletter online by clicking here. Be sure to also check out our holiday catalogue, Books of the Season, available now online or in-store for free.

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Literature

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Your Face Tomorrow

- Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa

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Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow is a wholly remarkable display of the immense gifts of Javier Marias. With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new--espionage.

Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler--retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy--recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence. Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty's secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century. This compelling and enigmatic tour de force from one of Europe's greatest writers continues with Volume Two, Dance and Dream.

Your Face Tomorrow

- Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa

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Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marias's dazzling unfolding magnum opus, is a novel in three parts, which began with Volume One: Fever and Spear. Described as a "brilliant dark novel" (Scotland on Sunday), the book now takes a wild swerve in its new volume. Skillfully constructed around a central perplexing and mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, Volume Two: Dance and Dream again features Jacques Deza. In Volume One he was hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception. In Volume Two Deza discovers the dark side of his new employer when Tupra, his spy-master boss, brings out a sword and uses it in a way that appalls Deza: You can't just go around hurting and killing people like that. Why not? asks Tupra.

Searching meditations on favors and jealousy, knowledge and the deep human desire not to know, violence and death play against memories of the Spanish Civil War as Deza's world becomes increasingly murky.

Your Face Tomorrow

- Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa

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Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías's three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed "exquisite" (Publishers Weekly), "gorgeous" (Kirkus), and "outstanding: another work of urgent originality" (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza--hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception--back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.

Summer in Baden-Baden

- Leonid Tsypkin, Roger Keys, Angela Keys

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Summer in Baden-Baden was acclaimed by The New York Review of Books as "a short poetic masterpiece" and by Donald Fanger in The Los Angeles Times as "gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving."

A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator--Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything "right." Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared in The New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.

The Bridge Over the Neroch

- Leonid Tsypkin, Jamey Gambrell

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Leonid Tsypkin's novel Summer in Baden-Baden was hailed as an undiscovered classic of 20th-century Russian literature. The Washington Post claimed it "a chronicle of fevered genius," and The New York Review of Books described it as "gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving." In her introduction,Susan Sontag said: "If you want from one book an experience of the depth and authority of Russian literature, read this book."

At long last, here are the remaining writings of Leonid Tsypkin: in the powerful novella Bridge Across the Neroch, the history of four generations of a Russian-Jewish family is seen through the lens of a doctor living in Moscow. In Norartakir, a husband and wife on vacation in Armenia bask in the view of Mt. Ararat and the ancient history of the land, until they are unceremoniously kicked out of their hotel and returned to Soviet reality. The remaining stories offer knowing windows into Soviet urban life. As the translator Jamey Gambrell says in her preface: "For Tsypkin's narrator, history is a tightrope to be walked every minute of every day, in both his internal and external world."