Corazón tan blanco was published by Anagrama in 1992 (English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 1995), and it is Marías’s most celebrated single novel — the book that established him as one of the major European novelists of his generation. The title comes from Macbeth (“My hands are of your colour; but I shame / To wear a heart so white”), and the Shakespearean resonance — guilt, complicity, the impossibility of remaining innocent in a world of violence — pervades the novel.
The narrator, Juan, is a translator and interpreter who has recently married. He learns that his father’s first wife shot herself in the chest on the day she returned from her honeymoon — and that his father has never explained why. Juan becomes obsessed with discovering the secret, but Marías is less interested in the revelation itself than in the process of interpretation: what does it mean to translate another person’s experience? Can we ever truly know what someone else knows? Is knowledge always complicity?
The novel’s opening scene — the suicide, described in devastating detail — sets the emotional tone. But the narrative method is characteristically Marías: long, sinuous sentences that circle around their subjects, approaching from multiple angles without ever quite arriving at definitive statement. The effect is of a consciousness that is simultaneously hyperattentive and uncertain — seeing everything, understanding nothing with complete confidence.
The novel won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1997 and has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Collecting A Heart So White
First Spanish edition (Anagrama, Barcelona, 1992): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First Spanish edition: $25–$60
- First English edition (Harvill, 1995): $20–$50
- First US edition (New Directions, 2000): $10–$25