During the Christmas holidays I randomly asked a friend to read the first chapter of A Heart So White. I was interested in observing how this person who is not in any book spaces at all, and certainly has no idea who Javier Marias is would react to a neutral introduction to him. They read the chapter for some 10 minutes, maybe less.
“Well?” I chirped eagerly, “did you like it?”
“No, not really”
“Oh? Why not?”
“It’s way too descriptive”
I had packed a few other books in my bag, which I now had the bright idea to get my new guinea pig to try out. Next I handed him a copy of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the book that inspired the movie Shawshank Redemption, a cult and personal favorite. He read only the first two pages before proclaiming:
“This is the kind of book I like. Can I have it?” It’s the kind of book everyone likes.
There is a show I love on HBO called The White Lotus, there have been two seasons thus far and they satirize the vexatious lives of rich vacationers at the titular White Lotus resort. One of the couples in Season one is on their honeymoon after a brief courtship, too brief. The new wife is not from money, she’s the quiet let’s-all-get-along type, the husband is a cantankerous whiner, wealthy but selfish, demanding, demeaning of her career. She realizes she has made a terrible mistake.
I watched The White Lotus in the middle of reading A Heart So White, I only made the connection much later: the opening scene of the book is just like the couple in The White Lotus. Except for one thing, though. The woman in the book resents her new husband so much she leaves the table where friends and family are having their lunch, walks to the bathroom, stands in front of the mirror, unbuttons her blouse and aims her own father’s gun at her heart.
“Any relationship between two people always brings with it a multitude of problems and coercions, as well as insults and humiliations. Everyone obliges everyone else, not so much to do something they don’t want to do, but rather to do something they are not sure they want to do, because hardly anyone knows what they don’t want, still less what they do want, there is no way of knowing that. If no one ever obliged anyone to do anything, the world would grind to a halt, we’d all just float around in a state of global vacillation and carry on like that indefinitely.”
A Booktuber I occasionally watch once described Toni Morrison’s work as being “sentence by sentence”. I understood that in a way that didn’t require explanation, each of Toni’s sentences feels like her life’s work. While reading A Heart So White I thought…Javier is scene by scene, isn’t he?
It is a book about everything and nothing. There are entire chapters you would remove and they wouldn’t change the arc of the story. There are chapters that feel like a memoir or a novella. He takes a scene and forcefully wrings it to a point the reader is no longer sure what he needs to come out, what more still remains. He describes every slight motion, feeling, word, thought, implication, meaning, and when he’s sure the scene is empty he lets it go, and it’s another three chapters before there is a scene like that. A mercy.
In the meantime, he ruminates about irrelevant (but utterly engrossing) memories about random encounters and meditates about the big topics of life: the past, death, life, love.
In this way, the story doesn’t progress as much as it cuts from scene to scene. Sometimes it cuts and pastes, using all the same melodic phrases to describe the same wistful invocations. Ultimately the overarching story doesn’t really matter, it’s as much a book about why Teresa takes her own life in the middle of lunch as it is about a woman waiting for a man in the dark, who may or may not show up, as it is about a woman who sends nude videos to men she’s trying to date, as it is about a couple that plays the barrel organ at a street corner to the consternation of people working from home, as it is about grandmothers who everyday have to consider whether the kitchen knives are sharp enough.
Everyone obliges everyone else.
After I finished the book I immediately considered a Javier Marias project where I would read most or all of his works in a given year. And then I thought…are all his novels written in the same style? That would be dreary, wouldn’t it?
And yet I adored the book and it’s now an all time favorite. I will likely enjoy all his work that I read, but there is something about the writing that yanks you into it, admonishes you for just sitting there, and asks you to consider the big existential questions. The idea that imagination avoids the misfortunes of action, for example, the difference between a person who does a terrible thing and the person who eggs them by whispering into their ear, whether what happens actually happens and that everyone obliges everyone else.