Guido Morselli: Divertimento 1889

In an afterward to Divertimento 1889 (published 1975), Italian author Guido Morselli transparently defines his short novel: “A simple story with no special significance, and with nothing to teach…a flight from reality among the phantoms of the Belle Époque? I would not deny it.” But Morselli’s deceptive modesty here is but one reason the author remained largely in the shadows until after his suicide in 1973, after which publication of his works brought recognition that Italy had lost one of its finest writers. As even the title of this novella suggests, Divertimento 1889 appears to be escapist fiction. This is not entirely true. Rather, it’s escapist fiction that thematically examines the very idea of escape, written with a pregnant, tensile evanescence, like a shining soap bubble maintaining itself longer than one would think possible, and hinting at ineffable presentiments beyond its blithe, fairy-tale-like gaiety.

As raw material for his tale, Morselli borrows from the case of King Umberto 1, Savoy ruler of Italy from 1878 to his assassination in 1900, “An irrelevant figure, as incapable of doing harm as he was of doing good, as neutral and colourless as the seal embossed on state notepaper.” As the novel opens, the King sits stuck in his office in Monza, besieged, like any common bureaucrat, by tedious duties and “far too many papers, as always,” conscious already of his approaching end:

No mysterious allusions, no dark presentiments. He is far too sure of his fate. Some fine dramatic death, all over in a flash? No chance. His destiny is very different, and far worse. This futile slavish job of his, condemned to trail the length and breadth of his ungrateful land  - dusty, disjointed Italy - with no power and no responsibilities and yet pursued everywhere by papers and couriers, as though it all depended on him, as though he could alter a thing.

Morselli, who wrote an entire allohistorical novel about World War I, toys here with history on a smaller scale, inventing an episode missing from the actual accounts of Umberto’s reign: the king, on a whim, trades his mountains of paper for the mountains of Switzerland, and goes off on a secret escapade.

Adopting the pseudonym Count Filiberto di Moriana and taking along a small coterie of trusted advisors, Umberto decamps to the Hotel Adler in Groeschenen. The sale of one of the King’s landholdings to Frau Von Goltz of nearby Wassen,  aunt to a member of the King’s entourage, will serve as partial excuse for his presence. “Hunting,” whereabouts unknown, will serve as partial excuse for his absence.

As the King prepares his adventure, a breeze of independence wafts through his life: “All these preliminaries, every one of these preparations and precautions, was his doing and his alone – the King’s. Unaccustomed to such freedom of action, to exercising such ingenuity, he felt an inordinate pride in his achievement.” On the train ride over, the heady inexperience of such liberty makes him nearly ill, but, arriving and settling in, he senses an invigorating delight in being able to behave like a normal person:

Handing over your money, pocketing the change, behaving like other people do so enviably every day…He bought stamps, and postcards which he would never send, chocolate he would never eat because it was against doctor’s orders, a half-bottle of Kirsch which he presented to Mancuso, exactly like a real-life tourist who has to count every Swiss franc he spends.

The next day, walking alone in the alpine countryside, he stumbles upon Frau Von Goltz’s home and is invited in, causing the King to muse retrospectively, as though expressing the underlying theme from the many fables of royalty mingling secretly in society, “I discovered life.”

***

A “simple story with no special significance” - yet problems arise. As the reader can anticipate, the perils for a monarch of traveling incognito are legion, particularly in Switzerland, “the spies’ paradise.” These complications – among others a hitch in the land sale, the threat of an ostentatious visit by the German Kaiser, indiscreet dalliances, an inquisitive vacationing journalist – crowd in to give the story new tensions and accentuate the fragile glory of the King’s caprice. But balancing these tensions - and one of Divertimento 1889’s great attractions - is the way Morselli colors in its simple outlines with rich and often humorous glimpses of the Belle Époque. Digressions on the “impeccable Helvetian efficiency” of Swiss railroads, for example, convey the era’s infatuation with novelty and technology:

For then travel by train was a thrill which the railways companies fostered by devising ingenious circuitous routes, spectacular ascents and descents and contortions, fruit of a technology full of fantasy which, like the opera-house, prized set design and trompe-l’oeil effects purely for their own sakes.

Similar asides illuminate other aspects of Belle Époque life, such as the interiors of grand hotels; the period patterns and colors and textures of materials; vintages of great champagnes and marks of fine cigars; the splendid and imposing beauty of the Alps and the haplessness of foreign tourists who visit them:

A variety of spectacles was available to the village’s summer guests. There was the to-ing and fro-ing of the more dauntless among them, Anglo-Saxon for the most part, setting off to scale the glaciers with a tinkling arsenal of crampons, ice-picks, and Alpenstocks, amid a picturesque retinue of guides and muleteers and porters, and as like as not returning with broken bones and half frozen to death.

Morselli turns a similarly unsparing, winking eye on Italy itself:

The French (or French-Swiss, or Belgians) were bandying impressions of Italy. They had been struck by the sheer scale of everything in Italy. The variety of police forces (three of them, rivals yet not competitors, even four according to some calculations), the number of killings (Italians murder each other without cease, and preferably without motive), the hordes of unemployed day-laborers in village squares, the immense and unremitting uproar thanks to which the foreign visitor in Florence, in Genoa, in Milan, might just as well not waste his time trying to grab any sleep, day or night. The prodigious quantity of litter and empty bottles enhancing the natural beauty of the landscape, on the beaches, in the fields, all over the hills. Further peculiarities: if a train arrives at a station less than twenty minutes behind schedule; if a letter reaches its destination within three days of being posted, all who are party to the miracle cross themselves ‘just like we do when a calf is born with two heads’.

These amusing snapshots of a time past, besides being entertaining, underscore the novella’s surprisingly moving themes around mortality, obscurity, the nature of freedom, one’s relationship with history. Having escaped the confines of high office, however temporarily, the King cannot escape being reminded of his approaching end, not least by the print near his bed in the Hotel Adler, the Stufenaltar des Mannes, depicting the stages of life from infancy to decrepitude. Part of the charm and poignancy of Divertimento 1889, however, comes from its subversive reminder that death is the most democratic of institutions and from its linking the King’s fate to the imminent demise of an entire era, a world on the verge of disappearing, swept up by “the frenetic tempo of modern life, particularly as embodied in its all-consuming technology, such as the telegraph (and soon we shall have the telephone), electric lighting, the giddy speed of the railway train.” The “March of Progress” represents “the twilight hour” for monarchies, “the long evening shadows….beginning to close in…the climacteric.” As the King recognizes, a greater threat to him than radicalism or socialism is anachronism.

***

In the last line of the book’s afterword, Morselli counsels readers to “take this little tale in the spirit of its title. One person at least, I who wrote it, was diverted.” Make that two people, at least; in fact, I went out of my mind over this book. Beyond simple diversion, Divertimento 1889 offers a near perfect narrative of sparkling and unique charm and an extraordinary belle echappée that confers a lingering, nagging weightiness long after one has closed the book’s covers. We’ve been escaping too into Morselli’s glittering, romanticized past, within which there’s a foreboding reminder for all of us, whether functionaries or kings, of the ultimate impossibility of escape, of the number of days “enjoyed and those still to enjoy…shrinking fast, becoming ever fewer and more precious, to be uncorked and savoured one by one, minute by minute.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo: Where There's Love, There's Hate

When so many blogs – Jacquiwine’s Journal, 1streading’s Blog, Pechorin’s Journal, The Mookse and the Gripes - opined favorably on Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s 1946 novel, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Los Que Aman, Odian), I felt obliged to investigate the work myself. Several elements aroused my interest: a tragedy set atmospherically in an isolated hotel on Argentina’s coast; a series of untoward events leading to a corpse; a search for the killer, who might be anyone; a cascade of literary references that implied more promising fare than the mysteries one spurns in airport boutiques; and a most extraordinary narrator. Plus, as the authors hailed from within a Buenos Aires circle of glitterati whose ringleader was one Jorge Luis Borges, it’s likely they had more going on upstairs than those Grishams, Pattersons, and Scottolines whose flashy covers litter bookshop windows and fill the idle hands and fatuous minds of readers on public transport, broadcasting the decadence of our time.

I had better things to do. I’d been profoundly immersed in the Italian masters: Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto in all his solemn chivalry. The great Tasso, as yet unread, stared accusatorily from the nightstand. Taking but an hour to read an 125-page Agatha Christie-style pot-boiler would wrench me away from such important work. But from time to time the mind needs repose from its strenuous efforts, and, I reasoned, an indulgence in light-hearted fare could reinvigorate my capacities for serious study.

I brewed a pot of black coffee from the Ethiopian highlands, set a few Walkers ginger-stem biscuits on a plate of Deruta porcelain passed down through family generations, and, after dabbing a few drops of tea tree oil on my temples to stimulate my mental faculties, settled into the divan. Wrapping about me the shawl knitted by dear Aunt Louisa, I adjusted the lamp ever just so, such that its light would fall squarely on the reading matter at hand. No matter how slight a work might turn out to be, I will not leave myself vulnerable to critics suggesting that any lack of enthusiasm on my part might be ascribed to poor lighting.

Opening the book with the gentle reverence I extend to great volumes, I immediately saw that my ornately-carved ivory blade would be unnecessary. Yet another flimsy modern paperback with pre-cut pages. Heaving a sigh for civilization and adjusting my lorgnette, I thought of my literary endeavours, murmured “Farewell, Tasso!” and plunged into the realms of tawdry mystery.

But right away, a literary reference - to Petronius! Most propitious. The narrator, a doctor named Hubert Humbert or some such thing (probably a premonition of that salacious book by Nabokov) seemed, like myself, to be of a literary cast. He had come to the hotel on the sands – “a literati’s paradise,” as he calls it - on holiday in order to engage in translating the Satyricon. I have seen that movie, a typical modern abomination, though in frankness I cannot yet boast of having read the book. Still, though I maintained a vigilant and healthy skepticism regarding this Huberer’s literary bona fides, I prided myself on “getting” his references, both of them.

Knowing that I was in for a mystery (thoughtless, those bloggers, to spoil that for me), I impatiently skimmed the pages, awaiting the critical “whodunit” part worth reading. This consumed no small amount of time and required a second cup of coffee, though again I patted myself on the back for recognizing references that accrued with each passing page - Oblomov! L’Atlantide! - even if looking them up would have required an effort incommodious to the ideal reading environment I’d worked to create. I admired too the novel’s exceptional setting: the hotel’s ground floor already invaded by sand; the windows closed upon the wind-whipped grains, resulting in a plethora of flies; a great storm keeping everyone inside like in Jamaica Inn (the movie, not the novel, which I have not read). “We are being buried in sand here. Anywhere you turn, there is sand; it’s infinite,” complains Humert, as I would have myself in his gumshoes. Sand everywhere, a veritable book of sand.

Finally, though: habeas corpus! The authors produced the body. It belonged to Mary, with her sister Emelia a guest of the hotel, both girls apparently involved romantically with Emelia’s fiancé, a Mr. Atuel or Atwell (the spelling obviously one of those maddeningly impenetrable South American peculiarities such as whether to call - to pick one of these gaucho names at random - Mr. Gabriel García Márquez “García Márquez,” or “Márquez,” or “Señor”). Mary had killed herself or been poisoned. Instantaneously I deduced, from reviews identifying this as a murder mystery, that this was murder. The rather disagreeable Hulert Hulot, inserting himself into every scene, claimed strychnine poisoning. I questioned his judgment, as I would that of anyone who practices a specialty while simultaneously attempting to translate the classics, a division of mental aptitudes that could only diminish one’s credibility in both domains.

But as the investigation increasingly captured my interest, so too did the doctor’s finer attributes. He adamantly assures the reader – almost as though he were speaking of my own virtues - of his generous ability to register “with equanimity” his defeats and his victories, culminating in an irrefutably bold declaration: “May nobody call me an unreliable narrator.” My doubts evaporated. I now recognized that all along Huberman (That is the name! I have written it down) had been the first to offer reasoned hypotheses about the crime. If these proved largely incorrect or baffling to the less perspicacious, that could hardly be blamed on a man of such solid literary discernment. One need only look at the other doctors in the hotel, one a physician in name only and the other a louche dipsomaniac, to see my point. Further, none of the other personages appeared to have the slightest ability to understand literature, the police commissioner notwithstanding in his expressing admiration for a no doubt frivolous Victor Hugo book about a man who laughs (I know neither the movie nor the book, but it strains credulity to imagine that either could be good). When this Atuel/Atwell and a Mr. Manning spend a night reading every book in Mary’s library in order to find clues – she was, after all, a translator of detective novels – they demonstrate a narrowness of purpose that a true lover of literature could not abide. What, I wonder, did they retain of those volumes? Could they even distinguish between Michael Innes and Eden Phillpotts, or between Phillpotts and Harrington Hext? Any uncultured savage can “read” a book if it’s but a matter of searching for a particular passage.

One little sprite of a character I did very much like, the hotel owners’ son Miguel, whose fondness for animals I myself share. In one scene, a bloody albatross appears in the dead woman’s room. I shuddered with horror at the waste of such a magnificent bird and shed a tear for the ancient mariner’s ancient regret, but breathed with relief when I saw later that Miguel had stuffed the great fowl in order to display it as any hunter worth his salt would do. This was followed by a momentary resurgence of distaste, like mounting acid reflux (the third cup of coffee, perhaps), for mon semblable littéraire, mon frère Huberman, who, when, following the dictates of his deductive powers, ripped apart the chest of the glorious oiseau empaillé assured that Mary’s jewels, missing since the night of her murder, had been sewn inside. They had not been. A pity, but nothing a skilled taxidermist could not fix.

Any fickleness in my fidelity to Huberman, however, could not last long. He was so like me, driven by insatiable curiosity, yet gracious even when pursuit of the truth got the better of him. Witness his restraint in this passage, which might have been written by myself: “Whenever I come across someone reading, my first impulse is to snatch the book from his hands. I offer, for the curious, an exploration of this impulse: could it be an attraction to books, or impatience at finding myself displaced from the center of attention? I resigned myself to asking him what he was reading.” And when the good doctor risks going outside in the storm and falls into a bog of crabs, I could not help but feel, as I allowed myself another cup of coffee, as though my own skin were crawling. Such atmosphere! The black winds howling, the tormented waves scouring the whispering sands, legions of horrid crustaceans swarming my hero as he tumbled into the esparto grass. A risk-taker! I admired his inner compulsion to involve himself in the civic duty of helping to solve a grievous crime, much as I felt compelled to explore this novel on my own rather than chance a wrong-headed opinion that could see in such courage only an element of spoof. One must make sacrifices. As Huberman himself muses,

Why had I, having adopted as a fundamental rule of conduct never to expose myself to danger, never having signed any protest against any government, having favored the appearance of order over order itself, if in order to impose it violence would be required, having allowed people to step all over my ideals, in order not to defend them; why had I, having aspired only to be a private citizen and, in the lap of luxury of my private life, find the “hidden path” and refuge against dangers both external and within, why had I - I again exclaimed - involved myself in this preposterous story and followed Atwell’s senseless orders? To bribe fate, I swore that if I got back alive to the hotel I would benefit from the lesson and never again allow vanity, sycophancy or pride to induce me to act without premeditation.

Why indeed! I might have said the same thing about embarking on this slight work, so beyond the limits of refined taste. But the exercise soon reached its terminus. I finished the tiny book and chuckled mightily in case anyone might be watching. That such a thing could have been written by people whose lives suggested they knew something of literature… Perhaps I had missed something. Perhaps this bit of fluff disguised a clever roman à clef concerning the authors’ circle in Buenos Aires; is it not too much to suppose that even this Borges himself is represented? My bet is on Miguel, the little scamp, enjoying his capricious escapades and his little boat, the Joseph K (a perplexing name for a watercraft). If only the authors had provided more clues such that one might, with minimal effort, match the characters to the persons they were intended to represent. Perhaps too if they had aimed high and omitted this nonsense about a murder so that decent people, like myself and Huberman, could go about our business undisturbed. I can only echo the great man’s vain cry: “When will we at last renounce the detective novel, the fantasy novel and the entire prolific, varied and ambitious literary genre that is fed by unreality?” Imagine, I wondered while following a seventh cup of coffee with a heavy dose of bicarbonate of soda. The authors might have written literature.

 © Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés from his portfolio Indoor Desert

I inhaled Where There’s Love, There’s Hate for Spanish Literature Month, kindly hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos and Stu of Winstonsdad’s Blog. Please have a look at reviews by: Jacqui, Max, Grant, Trevor.

Javier Marías’ A Heart So White: “How many things are left unsaid in the course of a lifetime or a story..."

Artemisa, Rembrandt van Rijn, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (image: www.ibiblio.org)

A human heart appears in the first line of Javier Marías’ novel A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco, 1992), but we’re given no time to discern its color, as in the second line it’s blown apart by a bullet. In this novel that plays about with the mystery genre, Marías has immediately delivered a gunshot victim and her killer - one and the same - leaving only motive as the mystery at the heart of the book.

The abrupt, violent suicide in the first lines recedes quickly into the background, remaining a latent presence as the narrative develops. After all, it’s a trauma that occurred well before the birth of the novel’s narrator, the thirty-five year old Juan, who recounts it retrospectively only after the event, unknown to him his whole life, has come to light. Teresa Aguilera, the victim, had killed herself during a dinner party at home just days after having returned from her honeymoon with Juan’s father Ranz, who would later go on to marry Teresa’s own sister, Juan’s mother. Much is packed into the opening of A Heart So White, not only a glimpse of the complexities and secrets in Juan’s family but also an implication critical to the themes of the novel, present in the first line and affirmed again in the chapter’s last line, that Juan may have preferred never to know this family secret, this awful truth.

From the violent event that anchors the first chapter, the narrative turns in the second to a relatively innocuous, almost comic incident, yet given a consideration almost as weighty as that given to Teresa’s suicide. On his own honeymoon in a hotel in Havana with his wife Luisa, who is suffering from travel illness, Juan gazes from the room’s balcony at a woman standing on a corner below, obviously waiting impatiently for someone. When the woman notices Juan, she begins gesturing and shouting, demanding to know why he’s in the hotel, hurling epithets, threatening to kill him. An explanation presents itself moments later: Juan has been mistaken for another, who has appeared on the balcony next door, visible to the woman though not to Juan. But a seed of curiosity has been planted, and when the woman joins the unseen man in the room, Juan strains to listen through the wall to their conversation, overhearing an ultimatum the woman gives to the man: dispose of the wife who stands between them, either by divorce or by murder.

Many writers might take this as the initiation of a plot involving the overheard threat. Marías uses it instead to seed the narrative with another latent background element, and turns his attention to the resonances of Juan’s concealment of the incident, to the slight delay his attention to it causes in his response to Luisa’s waking: “I still find that delay inexplicable and even then I sincerely regretted it, not because it might have any consequences, but because of what, in an excess of scruple and zeal, I thought it might mean.” In Marías’ world of quotidian moral decisions and the formidable sway of language and silence, Juan’s hesitation and failure to share with Luisa what he’s overheard, a conversation that she too, we learn later, has heard herself, amount to an intrusion into the trust established between them, a disturbance of the “soft white pillow” on which the newlyweds rest their heads and share their lives. Like a drop of tincture, the incident falls into the couple’s lives and colors them (not unlike the drop of blood on the stairs in the first volume of Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow around which that volume is built; someone could likely write an entire dissertation on the spots, stains, scars and spreading points of color or flame or contagion in Marías’ works).

A Heart So White takes its title, as do many of Marías’ books, from Shakespeare, in this instance Lady Macbeth’s declaration to her husband, “I shame to wear a heart so white” after having likened her blood-stained hands to Macbeth’s color, “as if she wanted to infect him with her own nonchalance in exchange for infecting herself with the blood shed by Duncan.” Marías explores this notion of moral contagion through his repeated milking of words and incidents – from little white lies to murder - to pursue their resonances and reverberations. Around a constellation of situations, Marías explores how the spoken and unspoken exert force upon his characters’ lives; the nature of secrets and withheld information (“What is serious enough to constitute a secret and what is not, if it is not told?”); whether one should protect loved ones from undisclosed information (as Ranz advises Juan regarding his marriage to Luisa, “If you ever do have any secrets or if you already have, don’t tell her”) or whether it’s better to reveal all (as Luisa later advises Juan, “Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting”); the ways that language has a hold on the future should one elect to give it attention or not: the ability to hear what one wants to hear; to keep things unsaid or to voice them; to act or remain passive; how the very act of telling is a distortion; how language seems to carry an inherent quality of betrayal.

With a comic literalness, Marías unspools this last motif by placing Juan, Luisa and other minor characters in professions at the borders of language and truth: interpretation and translation. In fact, Juan and Luisa’s relationship is born from a blatant act of linguistic “treason”: when Juan finds himself assigned to translate between a British and Spanish diplomat with Luisa assigned as the “net” – an added assurance of accuracy in diplomatic interpretation – he flirts with and tests her by deliberately mistranslating the diplomats’ words, leading them away from affairs of state into opining on aspects of love (a lengthy disquisition on translation and interpretation, occupying an early section of the novel, must have made for an amusing task for Marías’ own translator, Margaret Jull Costa).

Marías’ rich exploration of language, silence, revelation, concealment, lies, and secrets is given added complexity, looking before and after, by his placing them in context of time and its mitigating or amplifying effects.  References to time permeate the novel; the same paragraph can contain a plethora of time-related words, multiple verb tenses and compression of pro- and retrospection that take the reader, as Jonathan Coe notes in the introduction to my edition, on “a strange, violent temporal journey.”

Marías’ sentences often indeed feel like a journey, piling up into extended meditations that can stretch for pages between one character saying something and another answering, or long, improbable soliloquies. These digressive philosophical ruminations emerge not only from Marías’ narrator but from other characters, even minor ones, such that his characters can come off as nearly interchangeable mouthpieces for some common font of ideas and reflections. Trying to imagine actual people engaging in the conversations that carry some of these ideas reveals a blatantly unnatural quality to the thoughts Marías slips into his character’s mouths or alongside their speech (though not terribly unlike the manner by which ideas are conveyed in a Shakespeare play). This stylistic device is something akin to meta-fiction, a means for Marías to drop the pretense of the realist novel that characters imply persons one might find in the real world, and to embrace the enterprise of fiction. But far from being mere disembodied voices, polyphonically enlisted in contributing to a philosophical treatise, Marías’ characters have flesh – often memorably so, as in his vivid description of the woman downstairs at the Havana hotel, of a body in a video in which the face remains outside the camera’s frame, and especially of mouths: of the painter Custardoy the Younger’s “long teeth,” of Juan’s father Ranz’s face with its mouth “as if it had been added at the last minute and belonged to someone else,” of “the moist mouth that is always full and full of abundance” that belongs to Ranz’s friend Villalobos. Marías constantly reminds readers of physicality, to the point of emphasizing, even in the first line, the terrible vulnerability of the body.

Whatever thematic seriousness or ponderous quality might appear in these long passages that weave themselves into the characters’ thoughts and speech are balanced by Marais’ fondness for humorously toying with the absurdities of the modern world. In one scene, he backgrounds a heavy discussion between Juan and Luisa with, on the television in the same room, the nutty antics in a Jerry Lewis film. In another, as Juan and Luisa dine with Villalobos, the last comically keeps spilling food on himself (more spots, more stains). Some of the most humorous parts of the novel come in a section that takes place when Juan gors to New York to interpret at the U.N. He stays with his friend Berta, who, involved in a video-dating service, screens a number of men whose alpha-male pseudonym choices make for a hilarious list (and also make one wonder how A Heart So White might have differed if written in today’s world of the Internet instead of in 1992). And while Marías chases down serious themes about concealment and honesty, his digressions at time bordering on philosophical essays, his frequent asides take deadpan aim at day-to-day topics: television and video; the absurd brevity of weekends (“You’re so exhausted that all you can do is gather strength for the next week”); the pomposity of diplomats and politicians; the odor problem of open kitchens; America (“a country where they cosset and mould their bodies, but only their bodies”); the boredom of being a museum guard. A scene in which Ranz talks a guard at the Prado out of setting fire to Rembrandt’s “Artemisa” because of the painting’s static refusal to divulge its secrets is one of the novel's comic highlights.

One can hardly ask much more from contemporary fiction than that it bring readers back to the primacy of language and its power, to the care one must take with words and their repercussions, to the “dangerous” act of listening. Such attention to the potency of words and silence could almost lead to obsessing in a brainsickly way over one’s most innocent utterances. In the end, Marías reveals – in providing the missing motive of the first line – the dramatic consequences that can result from mishandling a secret (which I’ll conceal here so as not to spoil it for those who haven’t read the novel), and the potential of information buried in the past to spread its contagion and emerge in the future, staining even those unborn at the time of its burial.

But Juan muses at one point, “It’s strange that words don’t have worse consequences than they do.” In the end, A Heart So White turns not so much on the matter of zealously guarding one’s words as on carefully nurturing one’s love, of nudging along one’s trust and care more attentively. After all, A Heart So White is also a novel about marriage, that relationship presumably built on mutual trust. “Marriage is a narrative institution,” says Marías’ narrator, pointing out the conundrum of narrative and relation, of the gulf of care between the unspoken and spoken:  “being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and then when you speak.” The novel too, of course, is a narrative institution; rarely does one come along capable of provoking so many second thoughts about the way we communicate.

I read A Heart So White for Spanish Literature Month, hosted by Richard and Stu. Other reviews of the novel include those by Jacqui, Bellezza, Richard, Tony, and Frances.