[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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[RussellPG]

I read this novel like a month ago, and I wanted to make a thread on this one, but for some reason or another, I did not. I'm glad Promtbr did it, because it's always necessary to talk about such an amazing novel as Heart so White.
It is important to quote how important is for Marias novel's the first paragraph he uses to involve you in his fiction. This novel is no exception, and it starts with a strong paragraph involving the reader immediately.

I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn?t a girl anymore and hadn?t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father?s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests.
Practically the whole books is trying to explain the first paragraph, why did Teresa killed herself coming back from her honeymoon. As the reading goes you learn that Teresa was Ranz wife, who after the suicide gets married again with the mother of narrator Juan.
The story of Ranz marriage's takes the whole plot to a new level, when little by little, Ranz's secret is unveiled.
This is a great example on how good a story is told, never losing the grip, always keeping you interested on what's going to happen.
A book you can't get off of your hands when you're reading it, and can't get off of your head when you finish it.

[RussellPG]

Last saturday I bought Los Dominios del Lobo (Translations should be The Domains of the Wolf, though I don't know if it's already transalated) which is the first novel by Javier Mar?as.
In an interview, Roberto Bola?o considered this novel as well as Vila-Mata's The Illustrated Assasin as the two novels which changed Bola?o's point of view of the new novel in Spanish.
Let's see how it is, I'll post my comments soon.