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A review by rachel_the_managing_editor
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías
4.0
3.7 stars
I fell in and out of love with this book multiple times as I read it. The conceit—a married woman you hardly know suddenly falls ill and dies in bed next to you moments before you were going to sleep with her—is ripe. Who doesn't love a good meditation on death? Many of the ideas (memory, legacy, history, chance, determinism, perspective) offered intriguing points of reflection. We are our own archivists, gathering meaningless data that will be lost in a second soon enough.
But when the analogies and metaphors I had underlined in the early pages cropped up again and again, they started to lose their luster. This book needed a better editor, I thought to myself. Much of the middle section dragged, though it had its moments.
Then the final act: the confrontation. The repetition swelled as the experiences of the two men (the husband and the would-be lover) lined up. I see what you're after, Marías. But I still found many the repetitive parenthetical asides to be heavy-handed and a bit too convenient. (Don't hold it against me.)
I fell in and out of love with this book multiple times as I read it. The conceit—a married woman you hardly know suddenly falls ill and dies in bed next to you moments before you were going to sleep with her—is ripe. Who doesn't love a good meditation on death? Many of the ideas (memory, legacy, history, chance, determinism, perspective) offered intriguing points of reflection. We are our own archivists, gathering meaningless data that will be lost in a second soon enough.
But when the analogies and metaphors I had underlined in the early pages cropped up again and again, they started to lose their luster. This book needed a better editor, I thought to myself. Much of the middle section dragged, though it had its moments.
Then the final act: the confrontation. The repetition swelled as the experiences of the two men (the husband and the would-be lover) lined up. I see what you're after, Marías. But I still found many the repetitive parenthetical asides to be heavy-handed and a bit too convenient. (Don't hold it against me.)