This match was judged by Mauro Javier Cardenas. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this,<\/a> and download<\/a> the bracket.<\/em><\/p>\n In the year 2010, seventeen years after I stopped watching soccer, I wrote a paean to Your Face Tomorrow<\/em>, claiming that \u201chere\u2019s the wonderfully parenthetical operations of a human mind in the 21th century,\u201d a phrase that later became a blurb in Spanish for Your Face Tomorrow<\/em>, which must have flattered fleetingly me since I\u2019m a frail human desperate for meaning, although the translation from \u201cwonderfully parenthetical\u201d to \u201cmaravillosamente parent\u00e9ticas\u201d must have shorn a few branches from my twig of meaning because I would have been embarrassed if any native Spanish speakers heard me say anything like \u201cmaravillosamente parent\u00e9ticas,\u201d in any case the parenthetical mind of Jacques Deza, the narrator of Your Face Tomorrow<\/em>, a mind that doesn\u2019t pay much attention to itself because \u201che\u2019s given up understanding himself,\u201d shares its wonderful operations with us throughout 1,232 pages, during a period in Deza\u2019s life when he was delivering conjectural character reports for the British Secret Intelligence Service and was estranged from his wife Luisa.<\/p>\n Looking back at the passages from Your Face Tomorrow<\/em> that I transcribed to my sketchbook in preparation for writing my paean to Your Face Tomorrow<\/em>, I\u2019m not surprised I transcribed so many passages supporting my partisan fervor for digressions\u2014\u201cdigression is secular revelation,\u201d Adam Phillips wrote\u2014especially when they were written by a Spaniard who translated Tristram Shandy<\/em> into Spanish, and out of this abundance of partisan passages there\u2019s one from Volume II that I starred as most significant because, according to me, it summarizes the kind of fiction Javier Marias seems interested in composing, so here\u2019s that starred passage in which Deza\u2019s in the women\u2019s bathroom at a nightclub, searching for the wife of a client: <\/p>\n [I] had lost sight of my mission, it had simply got mixed up with a few other things: lines of poetry, images and inherited memories as well as a story, none of which managed to fill my mind entirely, because none was particularly pressing, but they were all floating around in there, perhaps waiting to be picked up later by idle thought\u2014that is, by thought at its most active\u2014at the end of the day, when I finally went to bed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Since the year 2010, I\u2019ve often shared in conversation with my so-called friends two passages from Your Face Tomorrow<\/em>: (1) Luisa telling Jacques please let\u2019s not live together ever again; (2) \u201c[O]ne never experiences genuine self-disgust, and it’s that inability that makes us capable of doing almost anything.\u201d<\/p>\n (1) The anxiety about domestic life deadening human life, an anxiety featured in many pages of Javier Marias\u2019s A Heart So White<\/em>, often surfaces in conversation among those who are no longer young enough to playact at wanting so-called meaningful relationships, and what I like to share with my so-called friends who are seeking so-called meaningful relationships, as a sort of literary relationship advice, is something like look there\u2019s this 1,232-page novel in which, at the beginning, the narrator is estranged from his wife, and, toward the end, when they reconcile at last (and here I exclude any mention of Deza assaulting Luisa\u2019s new lover with a sword and telling him to get out of town or else), the wife says to the husband please let\u2019s not live together ever again. <\/p>\n (2) Given the vast gap between our imperfections and our expectations of reasonable perfection, the question of how could we have possibly performed Sin A \/ Sin B, plus the question of how could we have possibly not known we were going to perform Sin A \/ Sin B, become central questions in (some) of our lives, or at a minimum we retrofit these central questions around our past Sins A \/ B, and in the case of Your Face Tomorrow (some of) the central questions that Deza contemplates are how could have Deza\u2019s father best friend betrayed Deza\u2019s father? \u201cHow can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing?\u201d How could I have not known I was going to assault my wife\u2019s lover with a sword so I could get back together with her?<\/p>\n Arbitro ladr\u00f3n, my high school friends and I would scream at the referee as we watched the Ecuadorian national soccer team miss yet another opportunity to qualify for the World Cup for the first time, arbitro conchaetumadre, heaping our juvenile arsenal of insults on the referee because one of our obvious consolations, the consolation of the often defeated, I suppose, revolved around placing the blame for our loss on the rigged ref. <\/p>\n Will I turn out to be a rigged ref because I come from a small, often defeated country? Does it make a difference that, since I left Ecuador in 1993, the Ecuadorian national soccer team has qualified for the World Cup three times?<\/p>\n If you come across a new genre, do you raise your hand? <\/p>\n Gerald Murnane has invented a new genre: fiction as \u201cremembered imaginings,\u201d mind as place (\u201cThe far parts of my mind,\u201d Gerald Murnane wrote in a letter to Teju Cole published in Issue 3 of Music & Literature<\/em>, a literary journal that publishes more of my favorite artists per page than any other literary journal, \u201chold for me the same sort of interest that far countries probably hold for travelers\u201d). <\/p>\n Imagine \u201ca far-reaching and varied landscape\u201d that contains memories of characters from books, of imaginary racehorses and racecourses, in other words imagine the contents of Murnane\u2019s mind exiting Murnane\u2019s head and populating a landscape that Murnane then dedicates himself to contemplate through his sentences, a contemplation that thankfully does without psychological insight (because who doesn\u2019t enjoy a break from the murky diagrams of human motivation?), a contemplation that consists of unearthing patterns of images as a way to both architect the landscape and invent meaning, meaning defined here as (to quote Murnane from Issue 3 of Music & Literature<\/em>) \u201cthe discovery of connections between things that previously seemed unconnected,\u201d and now here\u2019s a relevant landscape quote from Barley Patch<\/em>: <\/p>\n He had always thought of the images in his mind as being arranged somewhat in the way the names of townships were arranged on maps of mostly level countryside and that the images were connected by feelings in the way that the names of townships were connected by lines denoting roads.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Let\u2019s track the progression of one fragment of Murnane\u2019s pattern making in Barley Patch<\/em>. The chart below, from left to right, tracks the pattern of images that emerges from King-in-the-Lake, the name of an invisible racehorse. Names of racehorses have a peculiar effect on the narrator of Barley Patch<\/em>:<\/p>\n The sound in his mind of one or another name would often seem to denote not a mere painted toy and not even an actual straining, racing racehorse but a knot of what he might have called compressed mental imagery . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The name of the invisible racehorse leads to \u201can image of a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water,\u201d which leads to a poem by Matthew Arnold, which leads to the \u201cview that might have appeared to a man lying in the bed of a lake of clear water.\u201d Follow the arrows to the conclusion of the pattern making: an imaginary contest in invisible racecourse. <\/p>\n I will wash my hands, I thought when I heard I was going to judge Marias vs. Murnane, I will let one of my guinea pigs choose for me and I will add a formal constraint to the pig proceedings so as to not appear unserious. Besides. I wouldn\u2019t mind being remembered as the guinea pig critic, or, as my compatriots might say, el cr\u00edtico de los cuys. <\/p>\n\n
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