Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm in the Carnegie recording studios in Manhattan to continue my conversation with Javier

Marius. He's come from Madrid on the occasion of the publication by new directions

of Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, the third volume of his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow.

The trilogy began with fever and spear, continued with dance and dream, and now we have the

trilogy's final volume, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell.

Poet John Ashbury, an admirer of Marius, described the trilogy to me as espionage novels

as if written by Henry James.

Now, Javier, one of the ways in which style influences substance, it seems to me, is that things that start out as revura comedy sequences, the entire second volume, more or less, takes place one night in a disco.

And we practically rub our hands in anticipation of the thrills of that night.

It's presented hilariously to begin with.

The characters are quite funny.

The novel's principal fool de la Garza is on hand to do the things that we know that he can do.

There's a horribly resurrected woman with all sorts of plastic surgery and appendages that is being steered around the room by first our narrator and then this foolish young man.

And then suddenly the evening is no longer opera buff but a terrifying evening.

And that consciousness we discover works this way, that just when we participate

in farce, we find ourselves participating instead in terror.

...