With every creak of this seesaw rhetoric, all the way up to that faux-profound conclusion, the specific words matter less and less. This is a kind of frictionless eloquence that does indeed recall Don Quixote, his inexhaustible orations on chivalric lore. And once again, that Marías is aware of what he’s doing, as signaled by any number of self-referential passages (“Get to the point,” Tupra tells Deza, “I get lost in your digressions”), is absolutely no excuse.

The ambition of Your Face Tomorrow, like its size, is unmistakably large. The novel consists of three volumes but seven parts, inciting comparison with Proust. This is Marías’s epic, and it is the nature of epic that it will sometimes bore us. The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, not to mention the Bible—all of these contain some rather formidable longueurs. Epic aims at plenitude; it wants to incorporate the whole of existence, make the work a mirror of the world. And if you want to be boring, Voltaire said, then say everything. But Marías, whatever he thinks he might be doing, is not trying to say everything; he’s only saying a few things, over and over and over again. The novel finally seems a kind of stunt. How much reflection can be balanced on how little action? How little matter can be stretched across how many pages? That Your Face Tomorrow is the work of a gifted writer is abundantly clear; that it is an epic failure is equally certain.