When deciding what to read next last week, I finally asked myself, "What am I waiting for?" and picked up A Heart So White. (I still have Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me set aside to read eventually.) I felt like I had been reading around A Heart So White, putting it off, for no particular reason. I do sort of wish I had read it sooner, but not sooner as in a few months ago; sooner as in before I read Your Face Tomorrow. Reading A Heart So White has given me the urge to go back and read all Marías' novels, in order.
Some Marías fan or scholar must have put together a dramatis personae from across his novels. Some recur: Peter Wheeler, who I first encountered in Your Face Tomorrow also showed up in Thus Bad Begins. Custardoy, from A Heart So White, was also a figure in Your Face Tomorrow, and I believe Villalobos from A Heart So White also made an appearance elsewhere. Others recur but with a difference: wives named Luisa, for instance. A Heart So White takes place approximately a year into the marriage between the narrator and his Luisa. Your Face Tomorrow takes place approximately a year after the dissolution of the marriage between the narrator and his Luisa (some 10-15 years after its start, if I recall). Which makes me want to go back and reread The Infatuations, which also features a wife named Luisa. Though, in that case, it's not the narrator's wife -- the narrator is a woman who has a certain fascination with the Luisa from that book.
Well into A Heart So White, I was still puzzling over whether the narrator and his Luisa were the same narrator and Luisa from Your Face Tomorrow. In fact, I would have had to wait until page 239 to know for certain that it was not -- that's when the book first reveals the narrator's first name, Juan (the narrator of Your Face Tomorrow is named Jacques or Jacobo or Jaime) -- if I hadn't accidentally glanced at the back blurb on the subway, which starts, "Juan knows almost nothing of his father Ranz's interior life...." (This is why I never read back-cover blurbs.) But there were other clues, the main one bing his father. I didn't remember the father's name from Your Face Tomorrow (if indeed you ever learn it), but I couldn't square the Nationalist father from Your Face Tomorrow, who never fully recovered professionally, or psychologically for that matter, from being on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and the horrors he witnessed during it, with the dapper, affable, opportunist father in A Heart So White. I'm sure a side-by-side reading, or at least one closer in time would bring up more obvious differences, but the evidently different fathers was the reveal for me.
It's not just characters that recur in Marías. It's also words and themes, whole sentences sometimes. The use of the word contract in the sense of contracting an illness, for instance, but also in the sense of a marriage contract, shows up again and again in his books. Marías' books do stand on their own, of course, but they become even greater as a body of work. In Fever, the first book of Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator stays up a whole night getting progressively more drunk and furiously cross-referencing books in his friend's library, looking for clues to confirm a suspicion he has developed. I feel like I could have this sort of a feverish night with just the works of Marías.
