A Heart So White (Vintage International)

Great read if you like well written literature. I will be buying more from this author

A very challenging book to read. I love it. A book to think about, marriage, secrets, language. Excellent writer. Excellent book. Sara

I should state upfront that while I am very taken with the writing of Javier Marias, I can well understand that it will not appeal to everyone. Relatively little seems to occur in his novels, and what does happen often proceeds at a glacial pace, as Marias or his narrator painstakingly examines rather mundane situations, occurences, even gestures, and spins out various possible causes and consequences, possible pasts and futures. The writing often is dense, but (for me) it always is engaging, and the reader's reward is a cascade of insightful ideas and perspectives on modern cosmopolitan life. The opening chapter of A HEART SO WHITE is a brilliant six-page account (all one paragraph) of the suicide of a young woman in the middle of a dinner party, at the end of which it is revealed that she was the narrator's father's wife. Shortly, we learn that the narrator's father, Ranz, later married the suicide's sister, who then became the mother of the narrator. In a sense, the remainder of the book is a quest, somewhat reluctant and oft-diverted, to find out why Ranz's previous wife (and the narrator's aunt) committed suicide, something that Ranz has kept secret for the 35+ years since. In the course of this quest, Marias explores many aspects of secrets and poses the question, Is it better not to know? -- which leads to the related question, Is it really possible to suppress the desire to know?, and then the further question, of course, is, In the end, is knowledge really possible at all? The novel's title comes from one of several lines from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" that recur throughout the novel and add depth and complexity to the work. Another recurring line from that play is Macbeth's "I have done the deed." Near the end of A HEART SO WHITE, Ranz says, "What I did was done, but the big difference about what happened afterwards is not whether I did or didn't do it, but the fact that no one knew about it. That it was a secret." In addition to secrets, other themes (some familiar to readers of other works of Marias) are the evanscence and serendipity of events in life, truth and the distortion of narrative, silence and how it can be as deceptive as speaking, and the obligations of/from the past, or the "weight of the past." A propos, perhaps, given the preoccupation with secrets, the novel features a lot of eavesdropping and instances of peering down into the street from overlooking windows and, conversely, spying from the street on upper-story windows, all of which intensifies a certain voyeuristic character of A HEART SO WHITE. This voyeurism is extended further in one of the humorous episodes of the novel (in my experience Marias always has his funny or witty moments) where the narrator assists a woman friend in her search for a mate through a dating service and the making and exchanging of videos, which, of course, conceal and distort as much as they reveal. The funniest episode in the book is when the narrator (a translator) first meets his wife Luisa (also a translator) as the team assigned to be the interpreters at a meeting between a senior Spanish politician and a high British politician (who appears to be a lot like, and perhaps is, Margaret Thatcher), a meeting at which the narrator occasionally takes huge liberties in mis-translating and thus re-directing the dialogue between the two politicians. A HEART SO WHITE (published in 1992) is similar to "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" (1994), and like that novel and "The Dark Back of Time" (1998) it is highly seductive and very much a novel of ideas. But those ideas are not quite as well-considered or on the mark as in the two later works, and the style not quite as mature and accomplished. The intellectual discussion tends a tad more towards cleverness than profundity, and the observations of human life tend more to concern its everyday conduct than its essence. Nonetheless, A HEART SO WHITE is a highly recommended installment in Marias's ongoing exploration of the secrets and meaning of life and the human obsession with knowing in the face of the impossibility of truly knowing.

He comprat aquest llibre en anglès per practicar aquesta llengua. Volia,ara, llegir a un autor espanyol traduït a l'anglès. No l'he acabat encara però m'he està agradant.

E' un thriller - la storia di un'omicido molto intrigante. Secondo me Marìas è il migliore scrittore spagnolo vivente. Chi non lo conosce potrebbe cominciare con questo libro molto facile da leggere.