Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

"Right at the beginning of this book the narrator, Victor, a ghostwriter, is at his lover’s house. She’s married and has a kid, who she’s put to bed. And then she suddenly dies, leaving him with a dilemma. He leaves some food for the child, who’s sleeping, and runs off into the night. The rest of the book is the development of an obsession with, and an inability to keep himself away from, the woman’s family. It’s deeply mysterious. One of the things I really love about this book is how Marías holds us at a distance from Victor. He’s the first-person narrator, but you’re left quite uncertain as to his drive and reasons for doing things. You wonder what’s happened, what sort of trouble he’s going to get into, and you’re also wondering why he’s doing this. But Marías does it in a way that doesn’t feel like withholding; it doesn’t feel artificial. You are with this person, but they’re unknown to you. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter His actions are in some way unknowable to him, too. There’s a line where he describes himself as a spy who doesn’t know what it is he has to find out. That’s a perfect one-sentence encapsulation of the novel, I think—and it moves wonderfully between realism and a sort of surrealism. There’s a scene where he’s with a sex worker who reminds him of his ex-wife, and he starts thinking that his ex-wife has changed her identity or something. It’s weird and uncanny and feels hyperreal—but oddly believable too. The book is filled with unusual moments like this. Also, maybe because I grew up reading postmodern novels, any time the author puts themselves in the text it just works for me. At one point, he gives a false name, and the name he gives is that of the author. That always makes me smile. It’s something I do in A Lonely Man , too, but it isn’t just for fun. I think it’s a way of pointing out that the borderline reality and fiction is a porous one – both are constantly leaking into the opposing space, stealing things from one another for their own purposes. The name thing is an honest acknowledgement of that slightly dishonest procedure. I guess so. A massively long soliloquy. I think all of Marías’s titles are from Shakespeare plays, and many of them are written in the same style—first person interior monologue. The typical Marías narrator is self-analysing and self-critical, and tends to cycle exhaustively through the possible reasons behind something that happened, or the potential outcomes of something they might do. Near the beginning of this book he’s thinking about the most embarrassing ways to die: slip in the shower, lightning bolt, a cigarette setting the bed alight, wearing a barber’s smock, dying in the middle of shaving with one half of your face covered in foam. It goes on and on. It’s very maximalist, which is quite different to how I write. It works so well, I think, because he has such an interesting mind. You want to stay within this person’s thought patterns. He strikes a great balance between a person thinking about things at length, and then these powerful and mysterious and compelling sentences. He’s great at generating tension. And he’s fascinated with spies. After this he went on to write a trilogy about a Spaniard working for the British secret service. He’s got a fascination with spy novels but his own are very idiosyncratic, a little like Modiano—who we’ll talk about later—who uses tropes of detective fiction and mystery novels without actually writing detective or mystery novels."