Pale cowardly hearts and hands red with guilt
Corazón tan blanco (A Heart So White) By: Javier Marías
Translated by: Margaret Jull Costa
Translated by: Margaret Jull Costa
(Penguin Modern Classics)
Javier Marías is one of Spain’s greatest modern writers, born in
Madrid in 1952, he has written ten novels, two collections of short stories and
several volumes of essays. Corazón tan blanco (A Heart So White) is Marías's second novel and
although it was published hard on the heels of his debut novel All Souls
it is vastly different in style and form than its predecessor. In comparison
one senses in A Heart So White a much freer Marías, more inventive in
both style and form.
If the name of the novel sounds familiar it is probably because you
remember it from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
My hands are of your colour; but I shame
To wear a heart so white.
These immortal lines uttered by Lady Macbeth pronouncing guilt and
cowardice set the stage for Marías's novel. The simplicity of the novel’s plot
can be summarized in a few words – a newly married translator learns the dark
truth behind his father’s three marriages – yet this is a more complex,
demanding piece of work that relies heavily on diving into the depths of one of
the novel’s prominent themes: the evanescence of human experience and the
Proustian idea that everything belongs to the past as soon as it happens.
Marías makes the reader feel the force of time right away from the
novel’s opening sentence:
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. (p.3)*
A long, sprawling sentence whisks the reader back and forth in time
through a negotiation of tenses promising that no conventional linear narrative
will dictate the flow of this work. Unconcerned with the prevalent worries of
plot Marías succeeds in penning a commentary on politicians, art and the
institution of marriage all the while emphasizing the futility of human
concerns, the lies they tell and the secrets they fear will be revealed before
time renders them obsolete.
Although the novel’s protagonist is a newlywed man named Juan and
his main intrigue lies in his father’s past A Heart So White is an ode
to women of all ages and social classes, it sheds a tentative, empathetic light on
women living in the shadows of the men they love. It is a study in female
emotions and desires portrayed through the female characters who surround the
protagonist from the woman who has just become his wife, to his mother who marries
her sister’s husband, his aunt who commits suicide, his ex-girlfriend and
long-time friend’s desperation in finding a man and even strange women who he
witnesses from his balcony, Marías through Juan reveals an obsession for truly
understanding women. He shows genuine intrigue in what drives women to act in
the ways they do, often sympathetic, yet critical Marías attempts to navigate
through the maze of female emotions connecting them through the songs that all
women sing when no one is listening those songs Juan has heard as a child, a
singing that Marías insists remains defiant to the imposition of masculine
life.
Rarely does one find a male writer who could portray his female
characters with such depth when most fall into the pit of the one-dimensional
character and fail to show the woman as a complex creature who is neither the epitome
of good or evil. Marías sketching the female as a whole, leaving nothing out
has done her justice by recognizing his female character as human, beautifully
flawed.
A Heart So White despite its male voice sings a woman’s
song. It is written by a feminist author who probably does not know he is one.
Read it patiently and listen to the lyrical rhythm its words play.
*Take a few minutes to listen to Marías reading the first page of A Heart So White and discussing recurring themes in his novels:
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