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Zusatztext "By far Spain's best writer today." --Roberto Bolaño "Brilliant. . . . An entertaining and intelligent novel." -- The Washington Post "The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature." -- Boston Sunday Globe "Marías is simply astonishing." -- The Times Literary Supplement “Marías is one of the best contemporary writers.” —J. M. Coetzee "A great writer." --Salman Rushdie "One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize is Javier Marías." --Orhan Pamuk "Stylish! cerebral...Marías is a startling talent...His prose is ambitious! ironic! philosophical! and ultimately compassionate." -- The New York Times “His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility.” — The New Yorker “Javier Marías is such an elegant! witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length.” — The Scotsman "Marías uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species! the human being." --W. G. Sebald "His prose possesses an exquisite! almost uncanny observation! recreating moments and moods in hypnotic depth." -- The Telegraph “Javier Marías is a novelist with style . . . His readers enter! through him! a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world.” —Margaret Drabble "A supreme stylist." -- The Times "Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James. . . . But he also deals in violence! historical and personal! and in the movie titles! politicians! and brand-names and underwear we connect with quite a different kind of writer." -- The London Review of Books Informationen zum Autor Javier Marias; Introduction by Jonathan Coe Klappentext Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Award, and widely considered Javier Marías's masterpiece, A Heart So White is a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles 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 onto the costs of ambivalence. 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 – often blindly – 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 – 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 ‘bre...
