a heart so white (marias)

The novels of Marias have this irritating habit of you leaving feeling bereft and inadequate. Bereft because, like all great novels, they gradually absorb you into the warp and woof of their worlds, slowly overwhelming you until you are so lost in them that there is no reason for them to end and when they do, you are left alone in the dark. Inadequate, because in entering these worlds, you are given access to another way of thought, which is in so many ways identical to your own way of thought, only these thoughts acquire, within the texture and framework of a novel, a sense of completeness which life can never afford. In documenting the ways of the mind with such relentless and brilliant precision, the author achieves the paradox of illustrating a way of thinking we can never emulate, and in so doing we pale beside the words he leaves on the page.

A Heart so White is a story of generational conflict, hidden crimes, and the secret workings of the heart, and how these secret workings interact with the secret workings (desires/fears) of the mind. If indeed the heart and the mind might be separate entities, if they are not, essentially, one and the same. (I would love to ask Marias about this but unfortunately he passed on last month.) The story is woven around three relationships: that of Juan to his new wife, Luisa, that of Juan to his father, Ranz, and that of Luisa to her father-in-law, Ranz. For the details, as ever, one must interrogate the novel (although there is little doubt that there remain some details which will not be revealed within the novel). Ranz, in the vein of Lady Macbeth, murders sleep, Juan, who works as a translator, murders Thatcher’s words, helping to kill her off, and Luisa murders no-one. The novel is put together through a bricolage of scenes and moments, in Madrid, Havana, New York and Geneva, which create a narrative, jumping around in time, that gradually reveals itself, the end rarely in sight, until it arrives, in a hurry, leaving you, the poor reader, desolate, bereft, alone again, or.

It is the very mundanity of the worlds Marias depicts that lend his novels their terrifying power. Because most who inhabit the Europe he depicts have been blessed with mundanity, a lack of dramatic action, a sense of inconsequence, and yet, at the same time, we still feel our lives to be inundated in action and dramatic action and the presence of seismic events, because this is what it means to be human. It means to experience the universe as though it has been constructed in order to give us heartache and terror, and a few good things too. The fact that we haven’t fought in wars or visited the moon doesn’t make this any less so. It was the genius of Marias to recognise and value this mundanity, to spin from its inaction stories and insights that pay homage to the trials of tribulations of living in peacetime, long may it last.