Customer Reviews

A Heart So White

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

For those for whom reading fine books is an integral part of their lives, so much a part that the world of writers seems a comfortable neighborhood, it is always a humbling experience to 'discover' a truly great author by chance. Picking up A HEART SO WHITE by Javier Marias, taking it off the shelf of books meant to read when all the good recent purchases have been finished, in fact a 'filler' until you decide what you really want to read next - this is how I came to this book. What a revelation that an author of this caliber and a book of this magnitude was 'unknown' until that moment.

A HEART SO WHITE is one of the more important books to come out of Spain, indeed out of the world literature in the last decade. Javier Marias writes with a style wholly his own, a liquid use of words that create not only rich images, but experiences in time travel, in plumbing the soul of relationships, of the importance of our individual pasts, of the myriad ways a single instant of time can be metamorphosed by a variety of observors. He is able to write a theme and variations, a prelude and fugue, a sentence so musical that its incredible length serves only to endear us to his luminous mind. The story is important - marriage, a conjugal bed as a theatre of discovery and exploration of the now and the then, and the terrible and beautiful ways a single moment can alter a life. But for this reader the joy of this novel is in the performance that awaits the eyes on every page, the depth of knowledge of the author, and the wonder of the magic of the written word. This book is a masterwork, well worth the commitment it requires of a reader. A Heart So White leaves you breathless, satisfied, yet hungry for more..in the next book.

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.

Any book in which the protagonist meets his wife for the first time in a room in which the other two people are Felipe Gonzalez and Margaret Thatcher gets my vote. Bored with the conversation he is interpreting for the two politicians, our hero translates "Would you like me to order you some tea?" as "Do the people in your country still love you?" The novel is full of such moments and one ends by wondering if Macbeth killed Mrs Thatcher in her sleep! The opening paragraph lasts six pages and there are many other long paras full of repetition and thoughtful, provocative, but not particularly profound or original bits of philosophy on life. It is perhaps too neatly plotted; there are too few loose ends, too much signposting of (and clues to) the ending, but I liked it a lot. Maybe it is just a collection of loosely linked short stories, each one a parody of a well known writer - I spotted passages that reminded me of Kundera, Auster's New York Stories, Calvino and Juan Jose Saer. Maybe he's just a very clever pasticheur; possibly it is just tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing - but it is very entertaining.

If you like a detailed, psychological analysis of love and family relationships, then this is a book for you. You need a while to get into Maria's writing style. His style is not the most readable - a sentence can be a page long. After you get used to the sentence legths, it is a great book to read. The plot is well presented with surprising flash-backs and time intervals. I started to really enjoy the book in the middle chapters. From then on the pace of narration is much faster and interesting coincidences makes you curious about what might come next. The final scene is gripping and very emotionally engaging. Overall a very intelligent book.

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.

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) 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.

A rather straightforward story line, creatively structured, unraveled slowly through nuance, sexual enticement, digressions, reversals, repetition, and thought provoking writing causing one to become intrigued by its intrinsic mosaic beauty.

Some novels are plot driven, while others seem to be pushed along by the development of ideas. This belongs to the latter group with its focus being on love, relationships and commitment. What plot there is involves a newly married Spanish translator and interpreter attempting to come to terms with what marriage means, while the mystery of why his father's second wife committed suicide (an event which opens the novel) is gradually revealed. If you don't mind the extended discourses on particular topics or enjoy thinking about the way relationships do and don't work then this novel could be for you. If you are looking for something with lots of movement and excitement you may be better off elsewhere. Even though paragraphs sometimes went for pages, I found it fascinating and even took down page numbers along the way of ideas I wanted to come back to. While I now know the mystery, I want to go back and think again about how it is that it is revealed. This very `literary' novel is well crafted.

one man's quest and struggle to learn or not learn the truth of a past secret death, and the secrets surrounding it... seeing so many instances of keeping secrets in his own present. A book that keeps the reader glued to the novel, as new secrets are revealed and kept. The simultaneous translations for the politicos just adds to the theme of secrets and revelations. A book that I could not put down - Marias has again written another riveting pshycodrama in which his use of language and characters keeps the reader up at night wanting to learn more.

This book is intriguing from the first scene. Having discovered it quite by accident, I have reread it several times, which says a great deal at a time when many people have adopted a fast-food approach to books, particularly novels. The characters are rich, complex and real. And while Javier Marias presents us with an involved and involving psychological drama, he also writes with trememdous wit and humour. I laughed out loud several times while reading this remarkable book.