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WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN AWARD • Widely considered a masterpiece, a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles the relentless power of the past—from the award-winning author of The Infatuations and "Spain's best writer" (Roberto Bolaño, national bestselling author of The Savage Detectives).
Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence.
Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence.
109 Reviews
3.5
Samuel Elder
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Lola
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Monica Dardi
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“4.5⭐️”
Patrick Wadden
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“what started out as a meandering chore slowly unraveled itself to be a rhyming puzzle box where scenarios stacked on top of each other revealing parallels through time. It felt very much like an MC Esher fabricated a novel that interwove the complexity of conversation and secrets, with each stairwell meeting to face another but different temporal situation linked in narrative. It's something I related to and found confounding sympathy in, that it's all happened before but in different ways.
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Where it falls short for me is Marías' desire to pontificate and plunge the resemblances in situations in your face over and over. Yes, I get it. I can notice that one of our characters is staring longingly at a bedroom window with a light that turns off, instead of reminding me the other three times this has happened in the story, allow the exercise to think how these are linked.”
About Javier Marías
JAVIER MARÍAS was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published fifteen novels, including The Infatuations and A Heart So White, as well as three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-four languages, has sold more than eight and a half million copies worldwide, and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. He died in 2022.
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Other books by Javier Marías
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