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Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me Javier Marías Javier Marias Margaret Jull Costa Books

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Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me Javier Marías Javier Marias Margaret Jull Costa Books

How many writers today have the audacity to open their novel with this: "No one ever expects that they might someday find themselves with a dead woman in their arms. . ." But Javier Marias is the most provocative of writers with whom U.S. readers should become more familiar. (I do wish he'd get another translator, however, as Margaret Jull Costa does not serve this author well).

Javier Marias is considered a genius and was Spain's hope for the 2010 Nobel Prize, which, (in my view unfortunately) went to the Peruvian conservative, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose books I've never been able to finish.

The following is an excerpt from my Amazon review of Your Face Tomorrow, Marias' immensely ambitious trilogy:

"Reading Marias . . . is more like a romp through a lush playground devoid of swings and slides. The anticipation is high in the beginning, but gradually we fall into a sort of passive walk around someone else's mind, an intellectual voyeurism that eventually numbs us into submissiveness the longer we read, until soon we've lost interest in the swings and slides and wander off with the writer into a rich labyrinth of words that compels us to search, question, gasp, deviate and learn."

This book is different but maintains the interior point of view and on-going self-examination. From the beginning, we share the guilt and fear and curiosity of the protagonist, Victor who is drawn into the life of the woman who dies in his arms at the beginning of an illicit affair while her husband is away on business and her young child is asleep in the next room. Through his eyes, we meet her family, and by the end, we hear the story of the dubiously grieving widower and his own love affair that ends in tragedy during his latest business trip to London. "So she didn't die alone, then?" he says to Victor after pouring him a whisky.

The irony is calculated and effective. The two men become each other's confessors, searching for reason, perhaps, but seeking also to unburden. They drink, they examine, they commiserate. But there is no absolution and they know it.

In the last long, paragraph, Victor thinks how little of one's life is remembered. He wonders where the memories go, the small actions and thoughts? ". . . it doesn't really matter because so many things happen without anyone realizing or remembering, everything is forgotten or invalidated."

This is the fourth novel I've read by Marias. It is an intellectually stimulating mystery with psychological insights. It's a book that presents a mirror to your own inadequacies, your own doubts and fears. I found this book, along with his trilogy, both fascinating and addictive.


Tags : Amazon.com: Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (9780811214827): Javier Marías, Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa: Books,Javier Marías, Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa,Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me,New Directions,0811214826,9780811214827,Literary,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,General,Literature: Texts,Spanish (Language) Contemporary Fiction

Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me Javier Marías Javier Marias Margaret Jull Costa Books Reviews

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.
How many writers today have the audacity to open their novel with this "No one ever expects that they might someday find themselves with a dead woman in their arms. . ." But Javier Marias is the most provocative of writers with whom U.S. readers should become more familiar. (I do wish he'd get another translator, however, as Margaret Jull Costa does not serve this author well).

Javier Marias is considered a genius and was Spain's hope for the 2010 Nobel Prize, which, (in my view unfortunately) went to the Peruvian conservative, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose books I've never been able to finish.

The following is an excerpt from my review of Your Face Tomorrow, Marias' immensely ambitious trilogy

"Reading Marias . . . is more like a romp through a lush playground devoid of swings and slides. The anticipation is high in the beginning, but gradually we fall into a sort of passive walk around someone else's mind, an intellectual voyeurism that eventually numbs us into submissiveness the longer we read, until soon we've lost interest in the swings and slides and wander off with the writer into a rich labyrinth of words that compels us to search, question, gasp, deviate and learn."

This book is different but maintains the interior point of view and on-going self-examination. From the beginning, we share the guilt and fear and curiosity of the protagonist, Victor who is drawn into the life of the woman who dies in his arms at the beginning of an illicit affair while her husband is away on business and her young child is asleep in the next room. Through his eyes, we meet her family, and by the end, we hear the story of the dubiously grieving widower and his own love affair that ends in tragedy during his latest business trip to London. "So she didn't die alone, then?" he says to Victor after pouring him a whisky.

The irony is calculated and effective. The two men become each other's confessors, searching for reason, perhaps, but seeking also to unburden. They drink, they examine, they commiserate. But there is no absolution and they know it.

In the last long, paragraph, Victor thinks how little of one's life is remembered. He wonders where the memories go, the small actions and thoughts? ". . . it doesn't really matter because so many things happen without anyone realizing or remembering, everything is forgotten or invalidated."

This is the fourth novel I've read by Marias. It is an intellectually stimulating mystery with psychological insights. It's a book that presents a mirror to your own inadequacies, your own doubts and fears. I found this book, along with his trilogy, both fascinating and addictive.