Javier Marías, A Heart So White ***

For our long-delayed trip to Spain, I chose a novel by Spain's (internationally) most famous contemporary writer. I should have known that a Marías novel was not going to supply any kind of local color to the trip: his plots and digressions deal in universal themes.

A Heart So White is similar in many ways to Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me: a Shakespearean title, a loquacious unreliable narrator, deaths at the beginning and end, long tangents on thematically related but narratively separate subjects. 

I would characterize the book's style as being like a jazz tune. It starts with a pair of impressive episodes that set the melody. The narrator then starts telling other stories that elaborate on some of the themes in those early melodies, riffing on them until the connection seems tenuous. At the end, all the elements come back together to restate the melody more fully. The book also uses a strategy I associate with David Lynch films: when the resolution of a narrative mystery seems imminent, the narrator defers the satisfaction of that resolution by shifting to another thread in the story.

I didn't enjoy A Heart So White as much as I did Tomorrow in the Battle. The beginning and the end are both awesome, but I struggled to care through much of the middle.