Every October, I wait for Javier Marías to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, Marías seems ripe for it—he is Spain 's major literary figure, his novels are widely translated and globally popular, and he has the slightly off-beat, niche status that seems to attract the committee to authors still in their prime. Grounded in Spain and the Spanish language, his writing nevertheless has a cosmopolitan, worldly quality that cries out for international recognition. In fact, he counts a number of Nobelists as admirers—his jacket blurbs prominently feature quotations from Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, and he is perennially mentioned when speculation begins over the coming year's choice.

If Marías is less well-known in America than in the rest of the world, it is probably due to the low profile of his main publisher, New Directions, which issues the majority of his oeuvre in excellent English translations by Margaret Jull Costa. Testifying to his growing popularity, he has recently been taken up heavily by the modish San Francisco-based Believer set: the magazine publishes his monthly column entitled La Zona Fantasma and this year Believer Books brought out one of his early works in a new translation ( Voyage Along the Horizon, reviewed with another new release, Written Lives, in our last issue). If Marías' moment on the international stage has not quite arrived, I would suggest that it is only a matter of time.

Time, indeed, is a good way to approach Marías' latest, Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 2: Dance and Dream. The second installment of what is rumored to be Marías' magnum opus (the third and final part is still in the works), the novel's temporal reach extends from the Spanish Civil War to a present-day London rendered uncanny in its anxiety. Yet the story does not "take place," in the conventional sense, at any one time. Marías frustrates all desire for a linear narrative with constant digression, reflection, and a heavy dose of mystery that throws a shadow of uncertainty over all temporal happenings.

If one were to extract a conventional narrative, it would go something like this: two secret agents of the British government nearly kill a man for dancing with the wrong woman in a London nightclub. If this sounds more like a Tarantino plot than Nobel-worthy literature, it is because elements of sensation are as organic to Marías' poetics as they are to Hollywood action movies. His earlier novels often begin with a shock and take place as the narrator unravels the causes: Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me begins with a scene of anonymous sex in which the woman mysteriously dies, while A Heart So White explores a young woman's suicide on the night of her wedding. Many readers, myself included, have a bias against such sensation—that it quickly exhausts itself (as in a Hollywood film) and denies reflection and poetry a place in literature. Marías explodes this logic. His unique brilliance lies in the ability to extract the most intense thought from the most intense action.

The central scene of Dance and Dream is ample evidence of this interpenetration of sensation and reflection. The narrator, a Spaniard working for a mysterious wing of the British government, finds himself in a handicapped bathroom with his boss and the offending dancer. In the scene that follows, our narrator finds himself trapped between his duty and his human feeling as his supervisor threatens with a sword (a lengthy excursus tells us that it is in fact a Katzbalger —"cat-gutter") and attacks the unlucky nightclub visitor. Marías recounting of this violence is constantly interrupted as events lead to reflection, and reflection to more reflection:

...a primitive blade, a medieval grip, a Homeric hilt, an archaic tip, the most unnecessary of weapons or the most out of keeping with the times we live in, more even than an arrow more than a spear, anachronistic, arbitrary, eccentric, so incongruous that the mere sight of it provokes panic, not just visceral fear, but atavistic fear too, as if one suddenly recalled that it is the sword that caused most deaths throughout most centuries...

The sentence, in typical Marías fashion, stretches two pages. A single moment—seeing the sword in his supervisor's hand—begins an avalanche of thoughts conditioned by a kind of positive feedback. Marías' prose operates like an atomic bomb: incited by a minuscule trigger of violence, the chain reaction perpetuates itself, encompassing all its surroundings and radiating into infinity.

Sensation is, for Marías, a way of disrupting the flow of time; its violence compels the speaker to step away from narrative. This can lead to reflection (as above), or to other narratives. Dance and Dream 's secondary thread (to assign a highly reductive notion of hierarchy to a defiantly asystematic recounting) is the story of the speaker's father in the Spanish Civil War and contains parallel elements of savagery that tie the constant anxieties of past and present. Reacting to both his father's account of a brutal murder and his supervisor's violence, the narrator turns to the fears of the present with the eyes of one profoundly affected by the terrors of his two home cities, Madrid and London:

...we watch the news every day with our hearts in our mouths...we don't have time to get used to it nor, therefore, to become sufficiently desensitized, to accept that this is the nature of war, be it treacherous or righteous, and that it is something that can be lived with on a daily basis...

Violence unites the present with the past; on the level of narrative, its force is centripetal, making all time one; in the telling, though, it provides the centrifugal impulse that gives rise to reflection.

The fluidity of time in Marías' novels clearly takes a great deal from postmodern literature, and readers of Pynchon and DeLillo will find nothing radical in it. Marías is unique in my mind, though, for the way he combines this temporal ambiguity of narrative with a powerful conventional narrator. Here it becomes difficult to speak of Dance and Dream in isolation from the first installment of Your Face Tomorrow, or indeed from the rest of Marías' works—they all seem to be narrated by the same voice. It is that of a cultured, intelligent, slightly neurotic Spanish male, not yet old enough for a life of pure observation nor still young enough for one of uninhibited action. The battle between the two impulses is essential to the narrative's constant self-reflection and expansion. Marías' speaker imprints all action with his own thought to such an extent that the world outside him is in danger of dissolution; the sensational elements are necessary to imbue reality with any kind of materiality.

Marías' art tends toward solipsism. His speaker invokes the objective reality of people and places only to subject them to the individual, subjective act of creation. Action is only a means to the end of its transformation into writing. To some extent, this is surely true in all novels, but the dichotomy of Marías' radical subjectivity and hyperbolic objectivity brings this interaction to the fore and produces the work's power. The world in which the story takes place takes on an uncanny tinge: undoubtedly resembling our own, it is represented in such idiosyncratic colors that we recognize it as through a polarizing lens. The polarizing agent is Marías' speaker, and the novel is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a projection of this voice.

This may explain why I will likely have to continue waiting for the announcement from Stockholm. The Nobel Committee is a high-minded group, and Marías' work is, its grounding in current fears notwithstanding, resolutely trivial; the world it creates, for all its superficial resemblance to our own, is ultimately an alternative to it, a realm almost of escape. Reflection takes the place of reality, sharply dividing itself from the sphere of action. Marías' novels are not merely apolitical; they are anti-political. This is a sharp contrast to the explicit politics of this year's (entirely worthy) winner, Orhan Pamuk, whose novels attempt to bridge a gap of understanding between East and West. The awarding itself can take on a political character, as it did last year, when the selection of Harold Pinter seemed more an endorsement of his anti-Americanism than it did a deserved recognition of one of the most influential playwrights alive. To choose Marías would be to repudiate political considerations and endorse a literature of solipsism and escape.

I do not mean this as a judgment of value. To require some kind of honesty in artistic reflections of reality implies an unconscionably narrow definition of the goal of art. Yet this seems to be the bias of the Nobel Committee and unlikely to change in the near future. Until then, though, we are lucky to have Marías' writing with its explosive dialectic of sensation and reflection, to pass the time.

Joshua Billings is a lame duck.