[agracias]

Macbeth murders sleep…
says the narrator at one point in the much hailed Spanish novelist Javier Marias’ highest profile work to date; his 1992 novel Heart So White.
I read Macbeth (unbelievably) for the first time last spring and had highlighted: “My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white” from Lady Macbeth’s response to Macbeth when he told her “the deed is done” (meaning Macbeth tells his wife he has murdered Duncan). With that said, one does not have to have read Macbeth to enjoy this novel. After finishing this, I had learned more about the layers of interpretations of the play than any of my rereading ever could.
Viscera:
The 40something newly married narrator Juan, is a government Interpreter slash Translator, and he, we are told has a ‘tendency to want to understand everything that people say, and everything that I hear, even at a distance’. From this vocation, Juan has privileged his premise that even everyday conversation, human dialogue is often a ‘matter of life and death’ in its influence in the course of human events:
Its strange that words don’t have worse consequences than they do. Or perhaps we just don’t see it, we just don’t think they have any consequences and, in fact, the world’s in a permanent state of disaster because of the things we’ve said.Soon after his honeymoon, Juan has decided that his imagined future together with Luissa his wife is a ‘concrete’ one, its trajectory is predictable. But he also has ‘presentiments of disaster’ and the discovery of the sources of these forebodings provide the impetus for his attempt make sense, to discover the reality of the chronicle of his enigmatic father, Ranz’s previous marriages and their dark secrets they have hidden.
In the course of his reflection he forms ‘hypothesis and conjectures’ of connectedness between past events of Ranzs’ marriages and his own current marriage and their influence on an imagined future. The strands, or threads of the fabric, are formed by two parallel stories of his father and his first wife Theresa; along with his own relationship with his wife Luissa. They form a weave with two counter-posed stories of couples: first is the purely conjectured relationship fabricated from an overheard conversation in a neighboring hotel room in Havana, the ‘story’ of Miriam and Guillermo. Second the pathetic attempts at a relationship of his friend Berta and her projected lover, 'Bill'.
The complete review in my blog Traces

Marias HAS the chops...


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