With the publication last year of Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first volume of a trilogy and his eighth translated work of fiction, it was plain that Javier Marías was embarking on a project which required readers to leave behind all conventional ideas of what a novel is. At one point in the book the narrator cleans up a drop of blood. On the last page, someone rings his doorbell. There are no other events. But for patient readers with a speculative cast of mind and a taste for stylistic adventure it seemed to be a work of genius.
The second volume, Dance and Dream, confirms this. Jacques Deza is a Spaniard living in London. Because of his acute powers of insight into other people, he has been taken on by a mysterious MI6- like agency to evaluate other people.
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