A Heart So White

The thing a novel does better than any other kind of art is put you inside the thoughts of someone else, as they fork and forget and turn back on themselves. In this book, Marías's sentences do just that, turning on shifts of memory and indecision and uncertainty in a way that, at first, gives the book a loose, almost inconsequential feeling. That feeling doesn't last: as the young, newly married narrator peels back the story of his, and his father's, past, you feel those loose fibers of thought binding into a noose, in a way that reminded me of Ford Madox Ford's sad, great little novel, The Good Soldier. Many people consider A Heart So White Marías's masterpiece; it's the first of his books I've read (it won't be the last), so I can't compare yet, but it sure feels that way to me.