Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías
Published 1994 · 125,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction
How hard is Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me to read?
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me scores 74 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Precise literary Spanish with a running vocabulary of ghostwriting, royal protocol and Shakespearean quotation.
- Sentence structure: 84 out of 100
- Very long sentences built by accretion, doubling back on their own clauses and deferring the point across whole paragraphs.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- Plot is repeatedly suspended for extended meditation on secrecy, memory and what the dead impose on the living.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- A moderate cast and slow action, but each scene carries pages of accumulated reflection and Shakespearean intertext.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- The narrator withholds his identity from nearly everyone he speaks to, and the novel's key conversations depend on what neither party admits.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The Richard III epigraph, the tape from the answering machine and the recurring figure of the person who is present but unknown organise the book.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- A professional ghostwriter who tells nobody the truth narrates a story about deception at enormous length, and never quite acknowledges the parallel.
- Resolution withholding: 84 out of 100
- The husband is confronted and nothing is confessed; the boy's fate and the woman's illness are never explained.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Linear narration continually interrupted by digression, embedded episodes and long retrospective passages that displace the plot.
How Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is regarded
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.