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A review by deea_bks
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías
5.0
This book is simply unbelievable. The happenings Marias appeals to in order to convey his ideas are quite far-fetched (I also found some of the happenings from A Heart So White, the other book of his I was quite fascinated with far-fetched), but this fact doesn’t make it less great. Now, after I have read some of Marias’ works, I can say that one certainly reads him for the philosophy behind, for the richness of ideas that makes one question human emotions, for the paradoxes he analyses and less for the action.
The style is a bit nauseating: imagine pages long paragraphs and not only that, but also pages long phrases that are so rich in ideas that they sometimes become tiresome because one cannot grasp such richness of ideas without making a pause for thought allowed by a dot. You keep hoping that the phrase will end in order for you to stop and think a bit of what you’ve just read and they just don’t… for pages. And you have to re-read them because you don’t want to be missing anything as they are so stuffed with wisdom. I liked a Heart So White more as the plot was more convincing, but this book… is quite something.
A story does not happen completely, Marias says, “until you tell someone, until it is spoken about and known about”. “Until then, it is still possible to convert those mere events into mere thought, mere memory, nothing.”This is the theme of the book, this is the idea that makes the twist in the end so powerful, this is what makes this book quite brilliant.
The plot starts abruptly (this is no spoiler as you can find this in the first pages of the book): Marta, a married woman invites another man over, Victor, while her husband, Dean, is in London on a business trip. After they have dinner and they go to the bedroom, she starts feeling very sick and dies. The story is told by Victor and Marias insists several times that the person who tells the story chooses how to frame the truth in his story and what details to leave out of it. Everything is narrated from Victor’s limited subjective perspective. This is his story, not anybody else’s, a story of a tragedy he was a witness to. He talks about how this affects him, how he imagines this story affects all the persons related to Marta, he struggles to interpret the gestures of her relatives during her burial, he struggles to understand what Marta’s father feels, what her sister feels, what her husband feels. His ideas on death are priceless: the fact that one younger sister can become through a death both the younger and the older sister, the idea that death keeps someone forever young as age stops touching the dead ones, but time fades their faces in our memories, the idea that once we die, all our memories, all our inner struggles cease to mean anything, that our objects cease telling a story to anyone and so on.
The beginning was really gripping. All this supply of ideas really made me stand in awe at Marias resourceful mind. At the middle, I was getting a bit impatient, I could not understand where the story was getting as it seemed aimless. And then, there comes the end. There comes the end with a twist. And what a twist! This gripped my attention once again: something (a tragedy, in this case) has a different meaning for each one of us. What Victor had imagined about the take of the relatives on this event was his story. Marias lets us understand the view of another on this tragedy, what it all means to him, how facts unravel, how Marta’s death impacts another. We get to read the same story from the perspective of another… which is brilliant, in spite of the improbability of something like the narrated facts happening. And the theme of the book that I wrote about above is really strongly reinforced and turns the whole story full circle:
The style is a bit nauseating: imagine pages long paragraphs and not only that, but also pages long phrases that are so rich in ideas that they sometimes become tiresome because one cannot grasp such richness of ideas without making a pause for thought allowed by a dot. You keep hoping that the phrase will end in order for you to stop and think a bit of what you’ve just read and they just don’t… for pages. And you have to re-read them because you don’t want to be missing anything as they are so stuffed with wisdom. I liked a Heart So White more as the plot was more convincing, but this book… is quite something.
A story does not happen completely, Marias says, “until you tell someone, until it is spoken about and known about”. “Until then, it is still possible to convert those mere events into mere thought, mere memory, nothing.”This is the theme of the book, this is the idea that makes the twist in the end so powerful, this is what makes this book quite brilliant.
The plot starts abruptly (this is no spoiler as you can find this in the first pages of the book): Marta, a married woman invites another man over, Victor, while her husband, Dean, is in London on a business trip. After they have dinner and they go to the bedroom, she starts feeling very sick and dies. The story is told by Victor and Marias insists several times that the person who tells the story chooses how to frame the truth in his story and what details to leave out of it. Everything is narrated from Victor’s limited subjective perspective. This is his story, not anybody else’s, a story of a tragedy he was a witness to. He talks about how this affects him, how he imagines this story affects all the persons related to Marta, he struggles to interpret the gestures of her relatives during her burial, he struggles to understand what Marta’s father feels, what her sister feels, what her husband feels. His ideas on death are priceless: the fact that one younger sister can become through a death both the younger and the older sister, the idea that death keeps someone forever young as age stops touching the dead ones, but time fades their faces in our memories, the idea that once we die, all our memories, all our inner struggles cease to mean anything, that our objects cease telling a story to anyone and so on.
The beginning was really gripping. All this supply of ideas really made me stand in awe at Marias resourceful mind. At the middle, I was getting a bit impatient, I could not understand where the story was getting as it seemed aimless. And then, there comes the end. There comes the end with a twist. And what a twist! This gripped my attention once again: something (a tragedy, in this case) has a different meaning for each one of us. What Victor had imagined about the take of the relatives on this event was his story. Marias lets us understand the view of another on this tragedy, what it all means to him, how facts unravel, how Marta’s death impacts another. We get to read the same story from the perspective of another… which is brilliant, in spite of the improbability of something like the narrated facts happening. And the theme of the book that I wrote about above is really strongly reinforced and turns the whole story full circle:
”There are certain things that we should be told about immediately so that we do not, for a single second, walk about the world believing something that is utterly mistaken, when the world has utterly changed because of them…”