A Heart So White

by Javier Marías

Book Overview

​​WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN AWARD - Widely considered a masterpiece, a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles the relentless power of the past--from the award-winning author of The Infatuations and "Spain's best writer" (Roberto Bola o, national bestselling author of The Savage Detectives).

Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 030795076X
• ISBN13: 9780307950765
• Release Date: March 2013
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Secrets: an examination and exposition

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 examine rather mundane situations, occurences, even gestures, and spin 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) firs

...."My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white"

Xavier Marias is a master in leading us with the protagonist's story to the tragic hero of seemingly equal but more bridled remorse than Lady Macbeth demonstrated in the quote above. The act revealed toward the end of the story was committed in the blindness, selfishness and isolation of passion and love. I was fascinated with the author's ability to take us in the realm of thought flowing "between the lines", a consciousness we imagine, but often don't find on paper. To choose the profession of interpreter for his protagonist is a great tool to enhance that trait of awareness of sounds and language, of listening and interpreting. Besides the richness of thought, the story is a real page turner. I highly recommend it.

Hypnotic

This is the work of a writer of the first order. The book is both brilliantly written and a page turner, though the writer does go in for long hypnotic sentences and descriptions, some of them heady or philosophical. There is a series of separate stories in the novel, loosely woven together, though at first it is not easy to see the connections. All in all it's a book that would reward reading more than once.

A masterly woven distraction

I just finished this book last night, and i couldn't wait to review it. This novel is amazing! The narrator, Juan, is a newlywed, he and his wife Luisa have been married less than a year. His Dad Ranz works with art, was widowed years ago, and apparently has a few secrets that he's kept to himself over the years. Ranz was married twice, to two sisters, the first of whom killed herself shortly after the honeymoon. the question of her suicide and her motives are the carrot dangled in front of the reader in the first few chapters. But after that, other events begin to take more focus, seemingly unrelated events. Juan, while on his honeymoon in Cuba, is mistaken for another man, a neighbor engaged in an affair. Later while working in New York, he assists a dear friend with a mysterious sexually charged rendezvous with a man from a dating service. Between these events, the advice his father gives him at his wedding, the story of how he met his wife, and Shakespheare's play MacBeth(from which the title is from), you think this story is made up of tangents only to realize he's been painting the answer in vague wispy details. When you finally learn the secret, you're shocked, and yet you begin to see how he was pointing to it all along.Javier Marias is from Spain, and is a translator and professor. He has over twenty novels written in Spanish, of which only a few have been translated into English. My newest favorite author, i can't wait to sink my teeth into another one of his masterly woven distractions. I can't help from feeling that we're reading the work of an brilliant author whom America won't be able to ignore for much longer.

brilliant

Javier Marias demuestra su maestria en este libro, sera uno de los candidatos al Nobel en pocos años