Title | Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me |
Original title | Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí |
Author | Javier Marías |
Publication date | 1994 |
Language | Spanish |
Genre | Novel |
Pages | 292 |
Hours to read | 10 – 11 |
Words | 134k |
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a story focused on the theme of death and the feelings of guilt of those who remain alive.
The story told by Victor Francés, the screenwriter, takes place in Madrid and begins the night when Marta Téllez invites him to dinner in her apartment. Along with them there is also her son, who hinders their night of sex, because he doesn’t want to go to sleep, as if he knew what is going to happen, that is, she has an illness and dies. Victor will stay by her side without having the courage to look at her face, the last thing he’ll see is the back of her head.
We are so catapulted into the feelings and emotions of the protagonist, Victor, with his flow of thoughts and fears.
Marias tells the story with a slight shade of crime mystery: the story begins with a dead man and continues with a series of clues and details scattered here and there.
Victor initially tries to track down her husband, Eduardo, who is in London at the time, but then leaves the house, at least physically, because mentally he will be stationary at that time for the duration of the novel. He will try to outline the constellation of friendships and relatives of the deceased, reconstructing the past of the woman, but also his.
At the center of the novel, beyond the theme of the death of the way, how it is lived and accepted in its unpredictability, there are also relationships of couple mostly full of duplicity and deception.
The end of the novel is a sigh of relief for the protagonist, who listening to Eduardo’s story is as if he understood that his position is much less vile than what he expected and that he was a spectator in a sea of lies and in this way can leave the house.
What is surprising is that although individuals are constantly trying to create relationships, eventually they find themselves alone.
The phrase Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is the curse that the ghost of Queen Anne throws to the king, responsible for her death, in “Richard III” of Shakespeare. This phrase repeated several times in the text not only makes Marta always present, as if she was a ghost in the mind of Victor, but also explains her psychological drama, her sense of guilt: that of being still alive and being unable to save her. He just accompanied her to her death.
The child, in this context, who cannot speak, because he is only two years old seems to exemplify the modernity of the language on death. Death is unspeakable, indescribable.
The novel was much appreciated by critics and the public and won the Romulo Gallegos Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger.