It is pointless to speculate as to what kind of writer Javier Marías would have become if he hadn't received the praise of Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the entire "literary quartet" in 1996 for his novel "Mein Herz soweiß" (My heart so white) as a German bestseller and in first place on the "Spiegel" bestseller list.

The success in Germany - a country where his two previously published novels had received little attention - gave wings to his career and for a time created a literary fashion that is hard to imagine today: Suddenly the whole world was reading complex novels full of allusions , long periods of sentences, gloomy reflections and bold intellectual adventures, which dealt with old accounts, dead women and again and again with sonorous lines from Shakespeare.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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The following novel "Tomorrow in the battle think of me" (1998) is also a tribute by the anglophile Marías to the English playwright and his, Marías', own Oxford lecturer period, which he had previously - in the novel "Alle Seelen" (German 1991) - had provided with material and should later lead to the main work: the three-volume giant novel "Your Face Tomorrow", the last volume of which was published in German in 2009.

But by then the German criticism was exhausted and a little sobered up.

The Marías sound was nothing new, the motives of this narrator seemed to have been told.

The admirers of his prose have always found this unfair;

and so there are not only in Spain, but also in Germany outspoken fans who read everything from him and just can not get enough of the meandering reflections of the Madrilenian.

The total novel

The idiosyncrasies of the narrator Marías could be traced back to his habits and quirks: he hated social control, uninvited interference and new technologies.

That's why he didn't want to part with his electric typewriter, on which he wrote all his books, no matter how madly and senselessly the world around him went digital.

He didn't even write e-mails himself, an assistant did that.

The usually very extensive typescript of a new novel was corrected once by hand, then sent to the publisher and returned as proof.

The old-fashioned writing instrument expressed his dealings with the present, in which "the essential conflicts remain the same", as he once said in an interview years ago.

"Or remember," he continued,

“of the big telephone novel?

The great TV novel?

Then why should we assume that great novels are written on the Internet?”

His father, the philosopher and Ortega student Julián Marías, was still alive when the first volume of “Your Face Tomorrow” was published.

Part of the mammoth work with autobiographical traits is devoted to him and his role in the Spanish Civil War.

At the time, the Republican, who hadn't fired a single bullet, was denounced by his best friend and threatened with being shot by the Franco regime.

The courageous testimony of another saved his life.

Such are the key experiences that the author explores in the narrative in order to fathom the nature of lies, cowardice and betrayal.

Marías' alter ego in this novel is called Jaime (Juan, Jacobo) Deza and works for a special unit of the British Secret Service.

His specialty is

to decipher the faces of his fellow human beings and to make predictions about their future actions.

But the hero has to make do with assumptions, and when he visits his home in Madrid he too becomes almost as violent as his shady employers.