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Overview
Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Award, and widely considered Javier Marías's masterpiece, A Heart So White is a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles the relentless power of the past.
Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"By far Spain's best writer today." —Roberto Bolaño"Brilliant. . . . An entertaining and intelligent novel." —The Washington Post
"The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature." —Boston Sunday Globe
"Marías is simply astonishing." —The Times Literary Supplement
“Marías is one of the best contemporary writers.” —J. M. Coetzee
"A great writer." —Salman Rushdie
"One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize is Javier Marías." —Orhan Pamuk
"Stylish, cerebral...Marías is a startling talent...His prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical, and ultimately compassionate." —The New York Times
“His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility.” —The New Yorker
“Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length.” —The Scotsman
"Marías uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being." —W. G. Sebald
"His prose possesses an exquisite, almost uncanny observation, recreating moments and moods in hypnotic depth." —The Telegraph
“Javier Marías is a novelist with style . . . His readers enter, through him, a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world.” —Margaret Drabble
"A supreme stylist." —The Times
"Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James. . . . But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, and brand-names and underwear we connect with quite a different kind of writer." —The London Review of Books
Wendy Lesser
Marías...remains almost unknown in America. What are we waiting for?James Woodall
The work of a supreme stylist.... It is brilliantly done.Boston Globe
The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature.Ben Donnelly
Marìas's novel mixes philosophy and kinkiness, suspense and contemplation.Kirkus Reviews
A harrowing drama of family secrets and their deepening resonance throughout several involved lives, by an accomplished European author whose All Souls (not reviewed) appeared in English translation in 1993.Marias's novel (winner of the Spanish Critics' Award) begins with its narrator Juan's imagined reconstruction of the suicide of his father's first wife, his mother's sister, shortly following their honeymoon. Juan and his new wife, Luisa, are both translators and interpreters who labor to facilitate communication among "delegates and representatives" at various multilingual international congresses. They're also both perpetrators and victims of miscommunication within their own relationship and as members of Juan's continually traumatized family. The guilt borne by his father Ranz, a menacing, almost satanic figure whose experience of marriage and widowhood eludes his son's full understanding, casts troubling shadows over all those close to him—and finds mocking parallels in Juan's friendship with a crippled woman victimized by her recalcitrant lover and in his chance observation of an adulterous couple who may or may not be plotting murder. These perplexities are rendered in an unusual style that blends Jamesian introspection and qualification with headlong melodrama and rapid nonstop sentences. Marias's title and epigraph allude openly to Macbeth's murder of Duncan, and its sinister burden of simultaneous cumulative revelation and deepening mystery powerfully expresses its stated sense that "nothing that happens happens . . . and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable." The impression of characters caught in the toils of their own self-conscious self- exploration is reminiscent of Sartre's No Exit. The novel circles repeatedly, with an unflinching concentrated gaze, on its people's awkward spasmodic efforts to bridge the gaps that frustrate their need for mutuality and union.
The flawed, truncated nature of all human contact and efforts to reach it has rarely been given such remorseless stress.