Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence the relentless power of the past. 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 on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)
- ISBN10 0811214524
- ISBN13 9780811214520
- Publish Date 25 April 2001 (first published 5 December 1994)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 24 July 2013
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 280
- Language English