A Heart So White
SynopsisPlot
Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence 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.
Story
About this book
A Heart So White opens with a shocking act that shadows everything that follows. The narrator, Juan, is a translator living in Madrid who has recently married Luisa. During their honeymoon in Havana, a brief, unsettling encounter with a stranger on the street stirs in him a growing unease about his own marriage and the life that preceded it. His father, Ranz, married three times before Juan was born, and the circumstances surrounding those earlier marriages remain largely unspoken.
Juan is not someone who goes looking for answers. He is, by temperament, a person who would rather not know. Yet the act of marrying pulls him closer to his father's history, and the question of what happened in the past becomes harder to avoid. The novel circles around secrecy, the way silence can function as both protection and burden, and the unsettling weight of words once they have been spoken aloud.
Originally written in Spanish, the book has been published in dozens of countries and translated into 37 languages. It received the 1997 International Dublin Literary Award, previously known as the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, for the best novel published in English that year.
