The Spanish novelist Javier Marías appeared this week at London’s Southbank Centre, where he answered questions about the final part of his “novel in three volumes” Your Face Tomorrow, a country-hopping mixture of spy thriller, love story, comic novel and Proustian study of memory which in the Spanish editions adds up to 1,600 pages. Interviewed by Sam Leith, Marías contrasted himself with authors who “write with a map, so on the way they know they’ll find some cliffs, a desert and so on; I just have a compass, and I know I’m going north, let’s say, but what I find is a surprise.” What had he found most surprising in Your Face Tomorrow? “The length,” he replied to laughter, adding that only one more volume was expected when he published the first.

“I write and rewrite so much, between two and five times, but then don’t revise it again.” This is because he has a “suicidal” policy of banning himself from going back to material even if he knows it’s flawed. “I apply the same principle we adopt in life. We may wish at 40, for example, that we hadn’t married this person when younger, but it’s part of our life. Most authors would change the mistake, but I stick with it, I make it necessary.”

This month’s Bookslut interview (bookslut.com/features) is with Marías’s English translator, Margaret Jull Costa, who seems unfazed by working with an author who is not only a prolific translator of novels (including Tristram Shandy) from English into Spanish, but also often makes his narrator a translator or -as in the Impac prize-winning A Heart So White- an interpreter. Jull Costa outdoes him, revising her versions “nine or 10 times” , and makes no complaint about the writer’s wordiness. “It requires lots of rereading and rewriting,” she says, “but it’s very satisfying when one of those page-long or two-page-long sentences really works in English with no loss of cogency”.

JOHN DUGDALE

The Guardian, 14 November 2009