A Heart so White
Autor Javier Maríasen Limba Engleză Paperback – 2 aug 2012
Ne-a atras atenția, încă de la primele rânduri, vocea narativă a lui Javier Marias – o prezență hipnotică, reflexivă, care transformă un act de o violență șocantă într-o meditație profundă asupra tăcerii și a memoriei. Romanul se deschide cu un gest inexplicabil: Teresa, proaspăt căsătorită, părăsește masa familiei pentru a-și curma viața. Această scenă brutală devine nucleul în jurul căruia A Heart so White își construiește arhitectura complexă, explorând modul în care secretele nespuse ale unei generații se infiltrează în viața celei următoare. Găsim în această operă o structură narativă circulară, unde digresiunile filozofice despre limbaj și interpretare cântăresc la fel de mult ca acțiunea propriu-zisă. Juan, fiul soțului Teresei dintr-o căsătorie ulterioară, devine un detectiv al nuanțelor, încercând să înțeleagă de ce adevărul poate fi uneori mai periculos decât ignoranța. Cartea amintește de Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me prin modul în care un eveniment neprevăzut declanșează o reacție în lanț de introspecții morale, dar se diferențiază prin focalizarea sa obsesivă pe ideea de „inimă albă” – acea stare de inocență sau de vinovăție pasivă în fața răului auzit. Poziționat cronologic înaintea monumentalei trilogii Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3, acest roman cristalizează obsesiile lui Javier Marias pentru spionaj, trădare și natura fluidă a identității. Este o lectură în care ritmul nu este dictat de viteză, ci de intensitatea observației, oferind o experiență literară ce se simte deopotrivă ca un roman psihologic și ca un eseu despre fragilitatea legăturilor umane.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780141199955
ISBN-10: 0141199954
Pagini: 304
Dimensiuni: 131 x 205 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.23 kg
Editura: Penguin Books
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
ISBN-10: 0141199954
Pagini: 304
Dimensiuni: 131 x 205 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.23 kg
Editura: Penguin Books
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
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De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această carte cititorilor care apreciază proza densă, intelectuală, și care nu caută răspunsuri simple la întrebări existențiale. Veți câștiga o perspectivă unică asupra modului în care trecutul ne modelează prezentul fără să știm. Este motivul perfect pentru a descoperi de ce Javier Marias a fost considerat cel mai important scriitor spaniol contemporan, oferind o poveste despre secretele care mențin sau distrug o familie.
Despre autor
Javier Marias (1951–2022) a fost un romancier spaniol de renume internațional, traducător și academician, fiind adesea menționat ca un candidat cert la Premiul Nobel. Născut la Madrid, și-a publicat primul roman la vârsta de nouăsprezece ani și a predat literatură spaniolă la Oxford University și Wellesley College. Opera sa, tradusă în 34 de limbi, este marcată de un stil sofisticat și de o explorare meticuloasă a ambiguității morale. Pe lângă cariera literară, a fost cunoscut ca regele fictiv al insulei Redonda, reflectând spiritul său ludic și erudit.
Notă biografică
Javier Marías is the author of sixteen works in Spanish, which have been translated into forty-five languages including English. His translated English works are All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, When I Was Mortal, Dark Back of Time, The Man of Feeling, Voyage Along the Horizon, Written Lives, the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Fever and Spear, Dance and Dream and Poison, Shadow and Farewell), Bad Nature, While the Women Are Sleeping, The Infatuations, Thus Bad Begins and, Venice, An Interior. Javier Marías has received numerous literary prizes including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Formentor. He lives and works as a translator and columnist in Madrid.
Recenzii
The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature
I was enthralled
Marías' challenging and seductive technique reaches its pinnacle in A Heart So White
The work of a supreme stylist ... It is brilliantly done
As unique as it is brilliant... an entertaining and intelligent novel
I was enthralled
Marías' challenging and seductive technique reaches its pinnacle in A Heart So White
The work of a supreme stylist ... It is brilliantly done
As unique as it is brilliant... an entertaining and intelligent novel
Descriere scurtă
A Heart so White is the breathtaking international bestseller and IMPAC Award-winning masterpiece by Javier Marías, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features a new Introduction by Jonathan Coe.
A Heart so White begins as, In the middle of a family lunch Teresa, just married, goes to the bathroom, unbuttons her blouse and shoots herself in the heart. What made her kill herself immediately after her honeymoon? Years later, this mystery fascinates the young newlywed Juan, whose father was married to Teresa before he married Juan's mother. As Juan edges closer to the truth, he begins to question his own relationships, and whether he really wants to know what happened. Haunting and unsettling, A Heart So White is a breathtaking portrayal of two generations, two marriages, the relentless power of the past and the terrible price of knowledge.
A Heart so White begins as, In the middle of a family lunch Teresa, just married, goes to the bathroom, unbuttons her blouse and shoots herself in the heart. What made her kill herself immediately after her honeymoon? Years later, this mystery fascinates the young newlywed Juan, whose father was married to Teresa before he married Juan's mother. As Juan edges closer to the truth, he begins to question his own relationships, and whether he really wants to know what happened. Haunting and unsettling, A Heart So White is a breathtaking portrayal of two generations, two marriages, the relentless power of the past and the terrible price of knowledge.
Extras
Excerpted from the Introduction
I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore ߝ often blindly ߝ the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.
This was Javier Marías’s response to an online interviewer who asked him, ‘What is the purpose of writing?’, and it not only provides an unexpectedly lucid answer to that intimidating question; it also directly illuminates Marías’s own practice, and that of A Heart So White in particular. For this is a novel which asks the profoundest, most unsettling questions about knowledge itself: about human curiosity, about the keeping of secrets, about our need to know the truth and our (sometimes equally pressing) need not to know it; and about language, too ߝ for knowledge can only be imparted in words, and words, as writers know only too well, are slippery, unreliable, and have a tendency to falsify the very truths they are meant to impart.
Most novelists have a ‘breakthrough’ book, the one that introduces them to a wider public: in the case of Marías it was All Souls (Todas las almas), published in 1989. Offering up the simple pleasures of traditional fiction rather more willingly than some of Marías’s subsequent work, it tells the story of a Spanish academic who comes to Oxford and has an affair with a fellow-tutor, and has some points of contact with the ‘campus novel’ genre so beloved of Anglo-Saxon comic writers. A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco) followed in 1992, hard on the heels of that success, but there is not much sense here of a writer compromising himself in order to accommodate a larger, less specialized readership. The wisp of a plot can be summarized in a few words ߝ newlywed translator learns the deadly secret behind his father’s three marriages ߝ but it is a more opaque, demanding work than its predecessor. The novel’s long, looping opening sentence sets the agenda at once:
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)
Notice, first of all, what a strange, violent temporal journey we make while negotiating the jumble of tenses in that sentence. We start (‘I did not want to know’) at some unspecified point in the past, then (‘have since come to know’) move forward, then (‘when she wasn’t a girl anymore’) rewind even further into the past and then (‘hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon’) locate ourselves a little more exactly within this timeframe, and so on. Any promise of a conventionally linear narrative is immediately shattered, and we are already made aware, subliminally, of one of the novel’s major themes: the evanescence of human experience, the fact that everything belongs to the past as soon as it has happened, the fact that ‘everything is constantly in the process of being lost’.
This might, of course, easily be described as a Proustian theme, and indeed the length and complexity of Marías’s sentences have evoked stylistic comparisons with Proust, as well as with Henry James and Thomas Bernhard. But we would do well to remember that, earlier in his career, Marías had a distinguished parallel life as a translator, and probably his most celebrated translation was his Spanish rendering of Tristram Shandy. Because he is not the most obviously humorous of novelists, it might be tempting to downplay the extent of Marías’s affinities with Laurence Sterne: but they seem to me just as strong as his links with the great twentieth-century European writers. Like Sterne, Marías is prey to a radical scepticism about the novel’s capacity to render the complexity of subjective human experience in anything other than the crudest, most approximate way. Like Sterne, too, he is possessed by the notion that some of the smallest and most fleeting events in our lives are also the most significant; that these events occupy a space in our memories which seems quite out of proportion to their original duration; and that writers must therefore develop ever more inventive strategies that will give such transient but momentous events their narrative due.
There the resemblance more or less ends: for Marías, unlike Sterne, inclines towards narrative subversions which are po-faced rather than zany or farcical. One of his methods, for instance, is a highly distinctive form of repetition. Many novelists are scared of repetition, assuming that readers will take it for laziness or carelessness. Marías, on the other hand, realizes that our thought processes are often repetitious, and he wants to render this quality as scrupulously as possible. Thus we will find the narrator of A Heart So White reflecting that,
What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. (p.28)
Almost two hundred and fifty pages later, when the narrator has overheard a crucial conversation between his wife and his father, and has at last become privy to his father’s secrets, he writes:
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. (p.272)
Among other things, there is a certain rueful world-weariness about this technique: one of the things Marías is trying to tell the reader, it seems, is that no matter how much we experience, no matter how shocking or intense our experiences are, we remain locked within the same patterns of thought and reflection. One usually closes a Marías novel with the sense that human experience is immutable, and that people themselves rarely change. The precedent, again, might come from Sterne, although again Marías expresses the idea calmly and regretfully, with little of Sterne’s cavorting humour.
The notion that ‘what we experience is identical to what we never try’ has another consequence: not for Marías’s characters, this time, but for his literary aesthetic. It makes him sceptical of the line dividing fiction from non-fiction: a scepticism he shares with many other European writers poised on the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Two obvious examples might be Milan Kundera (whose books were, as our narrator is somewhat tiredly aware, highly fashionable at the time when A Heart So White was written) and W. G. Sebald. Like Sebald, Marías likes to include photographs in his fictions (there are photographs in both All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow), leaving the reader with nagging uncertainties as to whether they are real or fake. And, like Sebald, he is just as interested ߝ more interested, it might be argued ߝ in reflection and analysis than he is in narration. A typical Marías sentence might begin with the description of an event, but this act of telling will rapidly morph into something discursive.
I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore ߝ often blindly ߝ the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.
This was Javier Marías’s response to an online interviewer who asked him, ‘What is the purpose of writing?’, and it not only provides an unexpectedly lucid answer to that intimidating question; it also directly illuminates Marías’s own practice, and that of A Heart So White in particular. For this is a novel which asks the profoundest, most unsettling questions about knowledge itself: about human curiosity, about the keeping of secrets, about our need to know the truth and our (sometimes equally pressing) need not to know it; and about language, too ߝ for knowledge can only be imparted in words, and words, as writers know only too well, are slippery, unreliable, and have a tendency to falsify the very truths they are meant to impart.
Most novelists have a ‘breakthrough’ book, the one that introduces them to a wider public: in the case of Marías it was All Souls (Todas las almas), published in 1989. Offering up the simple pleasures of traditional fiction rather more willingly than some of Marías’s subsequent work, it tells the story of a Spanish academic who comes to Oxford and has an affair with a fellow-tutor, and has some points of contact with the ‘campus novel’ genre so beloved of Anglo-Saxon comic writers. A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco) followed in 1992, hard on the heels of that success, but there is not much sense here of a writer compromising himself in order to accommodate a larger, less specialized readership. The wisp of a plot can be summarized in a few words ߝ newlywed translator learns the deadly secret behind his father’s three marriages ߝ but it is a more opaque, demanding work than its predecessor. The novel’s long, looping opening sentence sets the agenda at once:
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)
Notice, first of all, what a strange, violent temporal journey we make while negotiating the jumble of tenses in that sentence. We start (‘I did not want to know’) at some unspecified point in the past, then (‘have since come to know’) move forward, then (‘when she wasn’t a girl anymore’) rewind even further into the past and then (‘hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon’) locate ourselves a little more exactly within this timeframe, and so on. Any promise of a conventionally linear narrative is immediately shattered, and we are already made aware, subliminally, of one of the novel’s major themes: the evanescence of human experience, the fact that everything belongs to the past as soon as it has happened, the fact that ‘everything is constantly in the process of being lost’.
This might, of course, easily be described as a Proustian theme, and indeed the length and complexity of Marías’s sentences have evoked stylistic comparisons with Proust, as well as with Henry James and Thomas Bernhard. But we would do well to remember that, earlier in his career, Marías had a distinguished parallel life as a translator, and probably his most celebrated translation was his Spanish rendering of Tristram Shandy. Because he is not the most obviously humorous of novelists, it might be tempting to downplay the extent of Marías’s affinities with Laurence Sterne: but they seem to me just as strong as his links with the great twentieth-century European writers. Like Sterne, Marías is prey to a radical scepticism about the novel’s capacity to render the complexity of subjective human experience in anything other than the crudest, most approximate way. Like Sterne, too, he is possessed by the notion that some of the smallest and most fleeting events in our lives are also the most significant; that these events occupy a space in our memories which seems quite out of proportion to their original duration; and that writers must therefore develop ever more inventive strategies that will give such transient but momentous events their narrative due.
There the resemblance more or less ends: for Marías, unlike Sterne, inclines towards narrative subversions which are po-faced rather than zany or farcical. One of his methods, for instance, is a highly distinctive form of repetition. Many novelists are scared of repetition, assuming that readers will take it for laziness or carelessness. Marías, on the other hand, realizes that our thought processes are often repetitious, and he wants to render this quality as scrupulously as possible. Thus we will find the narrator of A Heart So White reflecting that,
What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. (p.28)
Almost two hundred and fifty pages later, when the narrator has overheard a crucial conversation between his wife and his father, and has at last become privy to his father’s secrets, he writes:
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. (p.272)
Among other things, there is a certain rueful world-weariness about this technique: one of the things Marías is trying to tell the reader, it seems, is that no matter how much we experience, no matter how shocking or intense our experiences are, we remain locked within the same patterns of thought and reflection. One usually closes a Marías novel with the sense that human experience is immutable, and that people themselves rarely change. The precedent, again, might come from Sterne, although again Marías expresses the idea calmly and regretfully, with little of Sterne’s cavorting humour.
The notion that ‘what we experience is identical to what we never try’ has another consequence: not for Marías’s characters, this time, but for his literary aesthetic. It makes him sceptical of the line dividing fiction from non-fiction: a scepticism he shares with many other European writers poised on the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Two obvious examples might be Milan Kundera (whose books were, as our narrator is somewhat tiredly aware, highly fashionable at the time when A Heart So White was written) and W. G. Sebald. Like Sebald, Marías likes to include photographs in his fictions (there are photographs in both All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow), leaving the reader with nagging uncertainties as to whether they are real or fake. And, like Sebald, he is just as interested ߝ more interested, it might be argued ߝ in reflection and analysis than he is in narration. A typical Marías sentence might begin with the description of an event, but this act of telling will rapidly morph into something discursive.