This book was awesome! It took me a while to truely get into it, but at pg 112 I was infatuated. I look forward to reading more by marías. ( )

Even among a good number of excellent reads this year, this novel stands out as my most exciting discovery. It begins with a young woman who has just returned from her honeymoon and kills herself. Sounds like ur typical mystery paperback? Not at all. Fast forward to a hotel room somewhere in Cuba where the protagonist is spending his honeymoon. He happens to look out of the balcony and gets to be mistaken by a woman below for somebody else. It's the guy in the next room, it seems, whom she knew. Trivialities, petty occurrences, chance happenings, but things are not as trivial as they seem to be. He does not yet understand, but there are hints of connections, links between seemingly isolated banalities that reflect darker and more painful truths. Shakespeare's Macbeth provides the underlying theme, and how the author subtly interlaces the complex themes of love, betrayal, and truth into parallels in the story is simply extraordinary. Mariás weaves an intricate mosaic of fragments of stories, effortlessly shuttling between past and present, in rich, evocative prose with wit and a profound insight into our lesser explored inner selves.

This novel is deep, complex, multi-layered, and the author effectively draws us, through the protagonist, into self-reflection through stream-of-consciousness writing. It is certainly not for those who prefer fast, linear narratives. Highly recommended to those who are interested in “thinking” novels. This would be a very good book for group discussion/reading – lots of material there, both in terms of substance and writing style. ( )

Marias has a rhythm that he repeats throughout the book, in which an apparently natural inner monologue leads up to a surprising insight or an unexpected obstacle. It is clear that he thinks these changes of direction produce meaning, and that their accumulation can lead to deeper meanings. But for me, it's consistently disappointing to see him leading up to one of those moments, and imagining that the result will be expressive or even profound, and then turning, satisfied, to the next episode.

The book has a large-scale structure, and was clearly planned in advance, but on the level of the page, it is loose. Epiphanies were managed so much more tightly, and with so much more variety, by Joyce. Even though Marias is a very introspective person, there are clearly limits to his self-awareness when it comes to these structures. That lack of self-awareness extends to repeated phrases and images: he knows he is repeating them (he is not an unskilled or unpracticed author), but he believes they are justified by the ebb and flow of inner monologues. The result is loose and unbelievable, like a sloppily sketched painting.

I know this review is somewhat abstract, but it's on this level that he fails. If you can stop yourself from seeing how he thinks he is creating deeper meanings, then you can suspend disbelief in the naturalness of his prose. ( )

Thoughts: This was my first book read because of LibraryThing. I think I was looking for books written by Spanish authors – everyone I know trips over themselves when talking about Arturo Perez-Reverte, but it seems that he is the only Spaniard with any real recognition. Using Wikipedia and Livejournal as my guide, I discovered that Javier Marias writes for El Pais, had an uncle who produced pornography, and a philosopher father imprisoned under Franco. Well, if that didn’t make me love him on the spot – I don’t know what could have.

So, onto my TBR list he went and that was that last I time I thought about him or the book. That is, until I happened to be in an Oxfam bookshop that I rarely visit four months later. And there it was. An unused, unloved and untouched “A Heart so White” begging for a good home. I remembered my five minute online affair with the novel, and snatched it from the shelf. Almost as if I had been afraid someone else had seen it.

And so began a two month long journey with Javier Marias’s narrator – Juan.

Okay, so maybe when I started reading I had my expectations a bit too high. I wasn’t ready for the style of the novel, and had had no idea what the book about when I started to read. In fact, it took me about a month and a half to get past the first thirty pages. I don’t mean this in a bad way, however. Throughout the first thirty pages, I knew the words themselves were beautiful – they were just really difficult. The prose is intense, and lyrical – but it is long. Juan writes – for it is hard for me not to think of him as a real person – the way he thinks. And while his thoughts are stunningly beautiful, until you learn to ride his mind with him, you might be tripping over the plot a bit.

Oh yes, the plot.

Well, I couldn’t quite come up with a decent summary of this book without sounding like a lunatic – that is, until I saw this raving review of Javier Marias’s work in the NYTimes:

A simultaneous translator, recently married to another simultaneous translator, uses the growing friendship between his wife and his father to unravel the mystery behind a suicide that took place before he was born. [ ...] If you judged by the summary alone, you might guess that Marías’s fiction is ludicrously melodramatic or cruelly comic or tediously postmodern. It is none of these. On the contrary, all four novels possess an odd combination of true sadness and deeply satisfying wit that I have yet to find in any of Marías’s English or American contemporaries.

At the most basic level, the book is about a man discovering the truth about his father’s life. That’s how the book starts off and ends – but that won’t be why you’ll love this book. Marias’s Juan made me examine my own way of looking at the situations and people around me; inspired the philosopher I had never known was in me.

On another note, this book is excellent for all you armchair travelers out there. We head from Madrid to Havana to New York to the UN to Geneva and back again. Also, I would like to congratulate Margaret Jull Costa on her fabulous translation of this breathtaking novel. ♥ ( )

This is a novel of so many disparate episodes, it's hard to boil down. Family secrets long buried in the past, an adventure in mistranslation, episodes of voyeurism and eavesdropping, video dating as a chess game of selective exposure, the anticipation and finally the impact of revelation--all these elements are woven together in this novel to powerful effect. The pacing is like that of a mystery: each element, each situation is imbued with its own mystery and power, pulling the reader forward. Yet it is not conventionally plotted and the reader searching for a typical whodunnit will be tested. I do think Marias bears comparison in some respects with early Kundera in his tendency to weave plots (such as they are) together thematically. Marias is one of the most important writers at work in Spain today. Highly recommended for readers of literary fiction. ( )