ANOTHER MARIAS THRILLER IN SPANISH
A Marias book needs to be sold with a Surgeon General "warning." It's addictive and discombobulating, and messes with our innards.
Until his death at just seventy years of age in 2022, Javier Marías was touted to be Spain's most likely “future recipient” of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was translated into 46 languages and received numerous international literary prizes. This engaging tribute in The New York Times conveys the writer’s virtuosity while also observing how lightly he wore his fame.
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is only my second Marías pick and it will be months or years before I return to him. Reading a Marías book is a huge commitment, especially during the span of a week. His works are guaranteed to be dense (and tense). If the reader’s breathing becomes shallow, there is a reason why; a page of a Marías work is packed and leaves no breathing room. Please read my post about A Heart So White, yet another book that needs to be sold with a Surgeon General warning: “Reading Javier Marías causes catatonia and forgetfulness on flights and inside the home, too; it may compromise life in a household.”
A lot has been written online about how William Shakespeare was a huge influence on the author. Several of his book titles are lines from Shakespearian tragedies. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me alludes to the condemnations of King Richard III by the ghosts of those whose heads Richard III separated from their bodies.
Haunting is a theme in a novel in which the protagonist, in an ironic twist, is himself a ghost writer. He is a man called Victor Frances who finds himself in the scariest predicament one evening. He is in a Madrid apartment anticipating a night of love with an attractive 33-year-old woman named Marta whose husband is away in London. With her two-year-old son finally in bed, the night of romance is all set to begin when Marta falls suddenly ill and dies in bed in his arms.
We are both still here, in the same position and occupying the same space, I can still feel her; nothing has changed and yet everything has changed, I know that and I cannot grasp it. I don’t know why I am alive and she is dead, I don’t know what either of those words means any more.
What Victor does following the catastrophic end of his tryst is the crux of this gripping novel. Aware that a child is asleep in the house, Victor is faced with a moral dilemma and several choices. Victor may have walked away after taking care of a few important things but he is forever haunted by the events of that evening and the face of that child. He is painfully aware that the link established between Marta and himself—even though their relationship is not consummated—will never break or might take a while to do so. He is unable to think about anything else.
Victor is a haunted man who must go to extreme lengths to burrow himself into the late Marta’s family. What makes Marias’ works all-consuming, with respect to both plot and the intellectual exercise, are his digressions and detours. In his typical fashion, Marías, who was both a writer and a translator in real life, explores the verb “to haunt”
There is an English verb, '“to haunt” and a French verb, “hanter” which are closely related and more ore less untranslatable in Spanish, they both describe what ghosts do to the places and people they frequent or watch over or revisit; depending on the context, the first can also mean '“to bewitch”, in the magical sense of the word, in the sense of “enchantment”, the etymology is uncertain, but it seems that both come from other verbs in Anglo-Saxon and Old French meaning “to dwell”, and “to inhabit”, “to live in” permanently (dictionaries are as distracting as maps).
Each of these detours is delightful even though they can get vexing, especially when we glide through the denouement. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me begins as an action-packed thriller. Yet, within just a few pages, it pursues a dissection of human psychology, sustaining the tension over more than 300 pages.
The story is deeply engrossing on several levels. We begin to admire the protagonist for his angst over the death of his clandestine lover. Yet, we soon see the consequences of his actions, notwithstanding his moral impasse and his anguish. As the story unravels, Victor Frances becomes less reliable and shadier.
It’s tiring having always to move in the shadows, having to watch without being seen, doing one’s best not to be be discovered, just as it’s tiring having to keep to oneself a secret or a mystery, how wearisome clandestinity is, constantly having to bear in mind that not all your close friends can be privy to the same information, that you have to hide one thing from one friend and something else from another, something the first friend already knows about, you invent complex stories for one woman and, in order not to betray yourself later, you have to fix the details of these stories forever in your memory, as if you really had experienced them…
What makes Marias memorable for me are these precious observations about the human heart. He notes that what we see of another human are what is in the light, and that it’s up to us to reckon that the rest of it is in darkness. What is the person thinking? Does their thought match their deed? How much of a certain person do we actually see?
In a haunting passage from the book which I’m now unable to locate, we’re told to remember that in most relationships we enter a life at some point, not different at all from those “continuous” movies of yesteryears when we entered the cinema at a mid-point and make some deductions based on the events in the story. It isn’t until we attempt to capture the story from the beginning that we really and completely understand the lives of other human beings.
This sounds delightful. I have only read the three-volume 'Your Face Tomorrow'.