Customer Reviews

Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me

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At the beginning i thought this book was difficult to follow, and even a bit boring. My first impression is that the author was abusing the 'stream of consciousness' technique, just lost in his thoughts. But i continued reading and soon realized that there was a reason to the apparent 'madness'. This book is a concert of thoughts, all centered in a common point. The tangents or stories in the periphery were designed so skillfully that they complement the story without seeming superfluous: Ruibérriz, Celia/Victoria, el Único, all well defined and colorful characters, and the literary quotes mixed in with the text, the movie scenes, all contributing to enhance a plot already captivating. The main character struggles between decisions already taken or assumed, and the dialogs he has with himself are among the best i have read in Spanish literature in a long time.

The ending is unforeseen. When i thought i knew how things were developing, at the last moment i was surprised. Life can be so ironic, and laugh so much at our expense (or at Deán's expense, in this case).

The additional notes (another surprise i did not discover till the end) are very interesting, and if i had any doubts about the exceptional writer that Javier Marías is, i lost them completely after reading them. This novel cannot be missed.

A unique and haunting novel -- its words and ideas have stayed with me for months after completing it. Its thoughts have stimulated many philosophical discussions. It uses fiction to elaborate the questions of personal and subjective time, and the meaning of the intersubjective space. I regret I can read it only in translation. Nonetheless, the author's voice is unique and inquiring, and I can only imagine the recognition he will get in the future.

I read this book because of the title. The author tells us a story about death and unexpected moments in life. After I read this book I've found myself thinking "tomorrow in the battle think on me" very often! Also this book changed my views on death, on dealing with it, and what happens to those left behind after someone's gone.
Great book about thoughts and ideas not so much about events.

TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME is among the best contemporary fiction I have read. TOMORROW begins with the narrator (whose full name is not revealed until p. 232) in the midst of the preliminaries of sex with a married woman, who apparently is casting about for an affair, whose husband is in London and whose two-year-old son in a room down the hall, when the woman suddenly feels ill and shortly thereafter, half-naked, dies in the arms of the narrator. The rest of the book is taken up with the narrator trying to find out more about the dead woman and her husband and family, as well as slowly revealing to the woman's sister and husband what happened that night. (There also are three diversions or side-plots: a meeting with the King of Spain, a flashback to a bizarre evening the narrator had with a prostitute and his estranged wife more than two years earlier, and an outing at the race track.) But not much happens in the novel, and what does happen, happens at a glacial pace. That is because so many small actions and gestures, conversations, and even internal thought processes are meticulously analyzed. Marias, or his narrator, obsessively explores both alternative futures (courses of action) and alternative pasts (explanations and interpretations). Nevertheless, Marias achieves the sort of air of tension and suspence found in the best literate mysteries.

The writing is characterized by long, rambling, twisted sentences, sometimes strung together to form cascading, pages-long paragraphs. There are many interior monologues and many parentheticals, even lengthy interior comments by the narrator inserted within lengthy statements by other characters. The novel, idiosyncratically, is both an extended detective story and a phenomenally rich fount of diverse and intriguing ideas, observations, and ruminations -- both playful and somber.

The subjects include death and the ephemerality of life, the serendipity of events, solitude and solipsism, memory, personal identity, honesty (is it even possible?), story-telling, and social conventions (for example, recurring throughout the novel, the nuances of "tu" versus "usted").

Wry humor is almost always bubbling along in the writing and on a few occasions it erupts into a hilarious scene or vignette -- especially the one involving the narrator's interview with the King of Spain, variously referred to as One and Only, Solitaire, The Lone Ranger, Only You, Only One, and even "Only the Lonely" (and what would Roy Orbison think about that?).

The characters are not very likeable. They certainly are not heroic or noble. They probably are pretty representative of the moderately self-centered and affluent urban professionals that one might find in almost any of the major cities of Europe or America (in TOMORROW, the urban setting is Madrid). But although none of the characters is very admirable, the reader is hooked and drawn into their lives and thoughts. A certain kind of voyeurism pervades the novel.

My only criticism has to do with the ending, what happened to the dead woman's husband during the twenty hours in London when his wife lay dead back in Madrd but he didn't know it. What happens strikes me as overly serendipitous -- contrived serendipity for literary effect, if you will.

The odd title is echoed throughout the novel. It is a line from Shakespeare's "Richard III", Act 5, Scene 3. That line and others quoted in the novel are spoken by various ghosts of past victims of Richard III who appear to him in a dream on the eve of the crucial battle against Richmond (to become Henry VII). Richard awakes from this dream with a start, full of fear and foreboding about the outcome of the forthcoming battle, but aware that he has only himself to blame:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
A film version of "Richard III", by the way, was showing on the television when the narrator turns it on after his odd nighttime encounter with a prostitute whom he suspected was his estranged wife. TOMORROW is replete with complicated and tantalizing scenarios like that, which if one were so inclined, provide ample fodder for secondary analysis and commentary.

I am quite taken with the novel and with Marias' style. Although I don't know Spanish well, I sense that this was a challenging work to translate and I suspect that Margaret Jull Costa came through superbly, that her translation is as distinguished among translations as TOMORROW is distinguished among contemporary fiction.

No voy a negar que Javier Marias es uno de mis escritores preferidos y que, por tanto, mi vision y juicio objetivo, literario, de este libro se ve alterado por una cieta idealizacion hacia ese modo de escribir, de narrar, que hace de Javier Marias un escritor inconfundible en su estilo. Pese a ello, he de reconocer que alguno de sus libros no me ha gustado tanto como creia que sucederia cuando lo escogi. Sin embargo, "Mañana en la batalla piensa en mi" me sorprendio, me inicio en la busqueda de nuevos descubrimientos en la literatura comtemporanea hispanica y me ha llevado a lograr sentirme mejor con los libros que lei. Ahora ya se que clase de libros me gusta leer, y no dudo al elegir. Agradezco a Javier Marias el regalo que nos hace con su pluma y espero que lo siga haciendo para que podamos seguir disfrutando

Javier Marias's main strength is the exploration of situations with a magnifying glass, moving his zoom back and forth in time and space, recollecting previous thoughts and observations while moving forward with the chronology. On top of that he is a master architect of plots.
I read this 1994 novel in an English translation, which pleases me with the slow flow of its language. I had previously read `A Heart so White' in a German translation and I do not remember that with equal pleasure. Maybe this confirms again that I often like English translations from 3rd languages better than German ones.
Please note Marias's tendency to use Shakespeare quotes for his book titles. Macbeth in A Heart, and here we have Richard III.
That gives a hint of pretentiousness. The writing could be classified as Proustian style in a story which is a combination of a Highsmith thriller with an Almodovar farce, some Nabokovianisms thrown in.

The situation: our narrator, a writer by profession and somewhere in middle age, has an adventure with a married woman in Madrid, whose husband is on a trip to London, and whose little boy of 2 must be taken to bed before the encounter can proceed, after dinner in her apartment. The two met only recently and hardly know each other. During most of the evening, nothing is clear or explicit. When they start procedures in her bedroom, she begins to feel unwell and finally dies. During the process he has time to wonder what he ought to do. Obviously the outcome of her problem is not predictable, and his social unease is hard to bear for a reader who imagines himself in the same position... (as one is forced to do, being drawn into the speculative and hyperaware narrative).

But we are not heading for a straightforward thriller, rather a combined mystery cum society farce in the world of writing and yuppies and royalty. After our hero has left the apartment, he will enter the lives of the woman's family members (father, sister, husband) in an obsessive manner. He makes friends with the woman's father under a pretext, which leads to a hilarious scene, when he gets interviewed by the King of Spain for a job as ghostwriter. We meet a caricature of the man, variously called Solo, Solitaire, Only You, Lone Ranger, Only the Lonely, The Only One, Solus (a hint of Nabokov here? Not the only one!)... We suspect the king to spend his free time with pinball machines and table soccer. (In most monarchies, this chapter would guarantee the author some deep trouble.)

The novel is a series of weird interrelated scenes. The narrator reminisces how he picked up a streetwalker, who had reminded him of his divorced wife (after he had previously heard rumors that his wife was seen frequenting prostitute bars). He is so obsessed with the similarity that he fears for the safety of his ex-wife and breaks into her apartment at night to check if she is safe, imagining her to be with a john. We begin to fear for the narrator's sanity. (And I have some doubts about the plot or the translation here, as the actual scene is said to have happened 2 years earlier, but then is woven into the present tense of events. Or is it another hint at mental derailment?)
He starts stalking the dead woman's sister (watches her buy Lolita in a bookshop...) and finally gets to disclose himself to the sister (in the hope to `complete' the adventure that had been `stalled' by death?) But let's not spoil the thriller mode.

The various scenes and encounters are playing on aspects of identity: the king wishes to know who he is, he complains about his lack of profile, which must be his ghostwriters' fault; the family wonders who the man in the dead woman's bedroom had been; the narrator pretends (?) to be uncertain whether his random street encounter is identical with his wife or not; he swaps identity with a colleague, e.g. one auditions for a job under the name of the other; he has taken the tape from the dead woman's answering machine and wonders who the callers were... But this leads too deeply into the mystery aspect.

A note for movie buffs: much of the action plays at night, and many of the protagonists are insomniacs. One of their frequent night time activities is watching old movies on TV. We get to meet Fred McMurray (who has the same cleft chin as the dead woman's husband) and Barbara Stanwyk in an unidentified movie, watched with subtitles and no sound during the initial death scene. At the same time in his palace, the king watches on another channel Orson Welles as Falstaff. The woman's little boy's bedroom is full with airplane models, which remind the narrator of a previous night when he watched a movie about the Battle of England... (was there one with David Niven?).
My conclusion: a highly entertaining, intelligent, puzzling, somewhat pretentious, beautiful piece of writing. I will surely go for more from Mr.Marias.

Richard III, one of Shakespeare's amazing villains, becomes king through the murders of numerous rivals and bothersome relatives. In Act V, Scene iii, Richard is in troubled and guilty sleep the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, when the many people he has murdered or executed appear in his dreams. All pronounce variations on a riff from Lady Anne, his wife, who says:

.......Richard, thy wife,
that never slept a quiet hour with thee,
Now fills thy sleep with perturbations.
Tomorrow in the battle think on me,
And fall thy edgeless sword. Despair and die!

In TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME, Marias explores the guilty mind of his own troubled protagonist Victor, who is with Marta, a woman who he barely knows, when she suddenly becomes sick and, over a few hours, dies. In TOMORROW, Victor thinks obsessively and guiltily about Marta, who he might have saved had he taken charge. In hysterical and dreamlike speculation, he also considers the members of Marta's family and his relation to them and the tenuous, and often ironic connection, of the dead to the living. Here's a sample of troubled Victor's thoughts as he considers (page 228-229) Marta's sister Luisa, who he is stalking.

"Either of the two things could be true, just as one might say: `I never sought it, I never wanted it' or `I sought it, I wanted it,' in fact, everything is at once one thing and its contrary, no one does anything convinced of its injustice, which is why there is no justice and why justice never prevails, as the Lone Ranger [the king] said in his litany of disordered ideas: society's view is never that of the individual, it is only the view of the time and time is as slippery as sleep..."

Because of its stream of consciousness style, TOMORROW requires patience and concentration from the reader. In general, I'd say the book repays the effort, with the highly inventive Marias finding interesting and believable variations of his themes in the experiences of his characters--particularly the character Dean, whose trip to London is an eerie commentary on the tragedy of Victor and Marta.

Nonetheless, a reader of TOMORROW must be able to tolerate a narrative in which the style seems to prolong many scenes. There is, for example, a comic chapter describing Victor's interaction with Spanish royalty, which takes its time to establish the existence of another dreamlike world and a different kind of mental confusion. Likewise, a strange, albeit mesmerizing, chapter shows Victor conflating the identity of his wife and a prostitute, while inventing and considering the concept of co-fornicator. While this establishes that the futile Victor can be violent and possessive toward women, it also plays out with an obsessive's dilatory pace.

TOMORROW is a disturbing and dreamlike literary puzzle, which comes together with great force and clarity in its final few pages, where Marias shows the dead "struggling against their own dissolution and seeking embodiment in the one thing that remains to them if they are to preserve their validity and maintain contact, the repetition or infinite reverberation of what they once did or what happened one day..." Highly recommended.

The title of this book - which is repeated like a mantra throughout the work in a variety of improvisations and transmogrifications - is from Act V, Scene III of Shakespeare's Richard III. The words are spoken by the ghost of Clarence to Richard in his sleep on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field in which Richard is slain and England's War of The Roses ended. So, let's have the original in full before continuing on to the novel itself:

Let me sit heavy in thy soul tomorrow,
I, that was washed to death with fulsome wine,
Poor Clarence, by thy guile betrayed to death.
Tomorrow in the battle think on me,
And fall thy edgeless sword. Despair, and die!


Note: Edgeless here denotes "useless," as in a sword with no cutting edge.

The book, as translated into English, is nothing short of superb - as one should expect, as Marías is a noted translator of English fiction himself and more than a bit of an Anglophile; So much of an Anglophile, in fact, that he delves into the Anglo-Saxon word for co-fornicator herein for some length. But the significant - for the novel - section of the book which treats of English is where he explains the meaning of the English word "haunt" for which there is no precise Spanish equivalent. For, in the end, the highly stylised words of the very unreliable narrator - so unreliable that I'm not going to dwell much at all on plot - resemble nothing so much as a the words of a ghost, whispering to us all of our daily betrayals, failings, travesties and lies. This continuity of voice is what makes the book both important and sui-generis. The reader cannot help but be haunted and disturbed in a deep, inner sense as the narrator's voice continues ringing in his ears. In the end, he feels much like Richard III, one senses, must have felt on the morn of battle. On a personal note, at one point the book was so haunting and disturbing for this reader that he had to put it aside and take a long walk to get the sense of being alive and relatively well again, which Marías' narrator would be ever so quick to point out is highly delusory, but good for you all the same. Proust actually comes to the point in a LESS roundabout way in this case, when he simply states that "Lying is essential to humanity." - To yourself as well as to others.

The great absence here, which nobody seems to have noticed, but seems to me to overwhelm the whole text, is that of love, of passion. There is none before or after the death of the would-be adulteress in bed with the narrator in the first chapter through to the last syllable of the book. The only thing even approaching it is a densely muffled male sexuality. I didn't know what to make of this monstrous absence until the end of the book, when I realised that I'd been listening to a ghost whispering in my ear the whole time, whispering of my own insidious slippage, of death, of dissolution.

A magnificent feat not for the faint of mind or heart---or perhaps the narrator would say that those sorts are exactly those to whom he is whispering.

It would be tempting to say that very little occurs in Javier Marias' 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me', and substantially, it would be true. It is also true that there is a great deal happening, and it is only because of Marias' style that this contradiction is possible. I suspect that many readers, especially those who are used to snappy dialog and quick, conclusive action, will initially find Marias difficult, maybe even tedious - it forced me to focus, though once I adapted to his style, the novel flowed, with few interruptions, to its completion.

As I said, there is little in the way of action. Marta Tellez, wife and mother, dies of natural causes in the arms of the narrator Victor, prior to consummating their illicit affair. From that simple, if dramatic, springboard, Victor examines the boundless ways in which people are connected - from shared memories and experiences to the ties of friendship and relation which are often formed more by accident than design - as he pursues the ripples caused by Marta's death. Compelled, or perhaps haunted, by his experience, Victor infiltrates the dead woman's family, cautiously eager to discharge the duty he feels he owes them by sharing the details of her final hours, and yet at the same time he remains detached and ruminative, concluding his narration by inverting the way he started it - by quietly pondering how the world takes its leave of us.

For the little that transpires in 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me', it is a fabulously dense and lyrical novel. This is due to Marias' method, a loopy spiral of streaming consciousness that never directly attacks his point, but instead circles it, lays siege to it, until it finally capitulates. Marias' deft handling of the story is evident from the very beginning - this is not an affected journey of discovery for both reader and narrator. This is a deliberate delivery - a recounting - and is thus gracefully understated, transferred all the more effectively by the lack of false tension. Little suspense, perhaps, but so interesting it's difficult to put down.

If Marias makes a few missteps along the way, they seem minor and forgivable, and to my mind, only tangentially related to his main thrust of our tenuous and melancholic connection to the world and its inhabitants. Where Marias succeeds most effectively is in the subtleties he teases out of his narrative. The connections he writes of are not new, of course, but surprising nonetheless, as his technique for bringing them to the surface reminds me most of flowing water that slowly reveals the outlines of things buried in the ground.

There are some novels that seem more like literary puzzles, as if the author is reserving his ideas only for those clever enough to decipher his abstruse clues - thankfully, 'Tomorrow on the Battle' is not that sort of novel, but that isn't to say I'm able to fully appreciate Marias' meanderings in one reading. What a pleasure to find a story that looks to be as revelatory in subsequent readings as in the first. Unfortunately, Marias' appeal will probably be limited - his style will not seem friendly to a great many readers - but those who are immediately attracted as well as those who are gradually won over will be rewarded with a singular reflection and a contemplative pace that I found extremely satisfying.

Incredibly dense, sometimes slow going, but worth every vowel inside. This was my first book by Marias and by tpage 30 I knew I was reading a world-class author. I don't mean that in an elitist way. However, if you want to read the work of a first-rate mind, with page upon page of prophetic and quotable sentences, this is the book.

Parts of it reminded me of Antonio Atunes, yet no so dark. It is an amazing read from an amazing writer. People often hate it when someone makes distinctions between what is good writing and what is great; what makes something literature? Reading a book this inspired, and this crafted, layering history, culture, philosophy and narrative, illustrates the difference. THIS is contemporary literature.