A Heart So White Book

Masterfully intriguing and told using a seductive and challenging narrative, Javier Marias goes from sentence to dazzling sentence that reaches deep within the human psyche to reveal a family's past shrouded in mystery, where questions that are asked leads to unsettling hostilities, all the while exploring themes of love, desire and the good and bad side of marriage.

And it's marriage that sits somewhat uncomfortably in the foreground in 'A Heart so White'. Marias examines the commonplace yet peculiar institution of marriage and all its attendant secrets and betrayals. Taking a newly wed couple and delving into a history that's best left well alone. Juan is a newlywed translator who shuttles between the UN in New York and the Hague for six to eight weeks at a time, while his young bride Luisa, also a translator, remains behind in Madrid to establish their home together. In Juan's absence she develops a close relationship with her enigmatic father-in-law, a charismatic art dealer named Ranz who appears younger than his years and has a don Don Juan feel to him. Though in his seventies, the charmer he is, enabled him to marry three times despite the fact that his first wife died mysteriously in Cuba (maybe in a fire) and the second committed suicide in the bathroom while in the middle of a family dinner upon returning from their honeymoon. Trying to Learn more of what happened to his father's previous wives, Juan begins to question his own judgements on marriage and becomes increasingly paranoid that his Luisa has been unfaithful while he travels abroad for work.

As with 'The Infatuations' ( which I believe is vastly underrated) Marias takes his story and tells it in an unmethodical way, this could have been seen as a mystery thriller, Hitchcock style, in the hands of other writers, but Marias stays well away from any suspenseful thrills and goes with more of a philosophical approach to proceedings, pondering not only the curiosities of matrimony, he waxes lyrical on all matter of topics, and while there are digressions that may lose the less patient reader, he takes hold of his material and makes it technically brilliant, if a little overly enthusiastic in places. These asides, however, are always pertinent, building toward and culminating in an examination of passion so intense that it can drive a man to kill. As Lady Macbeth says to her husband shortly after Duncan's murder, "My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white."

His descriptive sentences are quite astonishing here, and the senses always play a key role in the overall structure of it's story, there is lots of watching people, staring out of windows, looking up at windows and pondering thoughts, the characters trying to reach their own conclusions on matters that are presented in front of them without fully knowing the scenario, Marias really gets inside their heads, and you see a vast change within these people as the story progresses to a satisfactory finale.

An engrossing and unsettling masterpiece of fiction from arguably Spain's greatest living writer, very impressed indeed.