"The friendship or business relationship between our fathers sometimes brought us together, although he was always closer to the adults, more interested in their world, as if impatient to form a part of it and to act independently, I remember him as a child old before his time or a frustrated adult, a man condemned to remain too long in the incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumed him. It wasn't that he took part in the adults' conversations, he was devoid of pedantry -- he just listened -- it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he's not yet allowed to enter... He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity."
A Heart So White is, on its surface, about a suicide in a family, and how that suicide comes to haunt the next generation. But the book, narrated by Juan, a translator by occupation, is essentially a rumination on many fine topics, including the nature of secrets, language, marriage and memory. Of particular concern to Juan is the relationship between what could have happened and what actually did happen, and whether there is any difference between the two, given the weakness of our memories and our tendency to lovingly dwell on missed opportunities and the dreamy future. I could discuss this further, as well as the role that storytelling and language play in such a dynamic, but then again I could drop it altogether, which, if Marias or Juan is to be believed, amounts to the same thing anyway. Such a state of affairs should make me despair, but it really doesn't, and I suppose that's one of the nice things about literature: we can choose which books we treat as scripture.
That is not to say that this is a bad book or that Marias is a bad writer. To the contrary, A Heart So White is well written, and full of provocative images and phrases that are repeated and eventually spiral in on each other as Juan unwillingly enters the vortex of his family history. With its emphasis on language, and the hall-of-mirrors effect produced by his use of doubles and possible coincidences, it could be a good candidate for anyone wanting to break out the analytical toolkit that has gone dusty with neglect since college. (This was the game I played for a while before happily giving up.) There is also one brilliant and hilarious scene in which Juan, the translator, spices up a staid meeting between two government officials from different countries by translating a benign request for tea as, "Tell me, do the people in your country love you?"
But in the end, with its detached, ironic tone, the book felt rather bloodless, and was hard to love.
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