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Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence 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 the shadows and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)

In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Brontë, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented.Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marías has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marías remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."

In 1970 Jorge Edwards was sent by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende as his country's first envoy to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted. In Kafkaesque detail, Edwards records the four explosive months he spent in Havana trying to open a Chilean embassy and his disenchantment with the revolution. His stay culminated in the arrest of his friend Heberto Padilla—the first imprisonment of a well-known writer by the regime—for giving Edwards a "negative view of the revolution." In a menacing midnight political debate with Edwards immediately after Padilla's arrest, Castro argued that in this phase of the revolution, bourgeois writers would no longer have "anything to do in Cuba." Castro accused Edwards of "conduct hostile to the revolution" and declared him "persona non grata." The winner of the Cervantes prize—the Spanish language equivalent to the Nobel Prize for literature—Jorge Edwards' memoir splendidly recounts this time and the wrath of Castro.

"No one ever suspects," begins Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, "that they might one day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms...." Marta has just met Victor when she invites him to dinner at her Madrid apartment while her husband is away on business. When her two-year-old son finally falls asleep, Marta and Victor retreat to the bedroom. Undressing, she suddenly feels ill; and in his arms, inexplicably, she dies.What should Victor do? Remove the compromising tape from the phone machine? Leave food for the child, for breakfast? These are just his first steps, but he soon takes matters further; unable to bear the shadows and the unknowing, Victor plunges into dark waters. And Javier Marías, Europe's master of secrets, of what lies reveal and truth may conceal, is on sure ground in this profound, quirky, and marvelous novel. "Brilliantly imagined and hugely intricate," as La Vanguardia noted, "it is a novel one reads with enormous pleasure."

In the mid-19th century, a mute woman is sent to New Zealand along with her young daughter and prized piano for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner, but is soon lusted after by a local worker on the plantation.

1993 romantic drama film directed by Jane Campion

A famous author goes on a cruise trip with her friends and nephew in an effort to find fun and happiness while she comes to terms with her troubled past.

Harry and Sally have known each other for years, and are very good friends, but they fear sex would ruin the friendship.

A married man and a married woman end up sleeping with each other, and decide to meet at the same place every year on the anniversary of their one night stand. As the years go by, they observe changes in each other and their relation

At the close of World War II, a young nurse tends to a badly-burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair.

A scheming widow and her manipulative ex-lover make a bet regarding the corruption of a recently married woman.

An elderly Margaret Thatcher talks to the imagined presence of her recently deceased husband as she struggles to come to terms with his death while scenes from her past life, from girlhood to British prime minister, intervene.

2011 British film directed by Phyllida Lloyd

A poet falls for a beautiful courtesan whom a jealous duke covets.

Although they live married lives, two strangers keep running into each other, starting a friendship that could blossom into so much more.

A poignant story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence set in England prior to World War II.

A butler who sacrificed body and soul to service in the years leading up to World War II realizes too late how misguided his loyalty was to his lordly employer.

1993 romantic drama movie. directed by James Ivory

A writer impulsively buys a villa in Tuscany in order to change her life.

2003 American romantic comedy film directed by Audrey Wells

In 1950s Connecticut, a housewife faces a marital crisis and mounting racial tensions in the outside world.

A biography of artist Frida Kahlo, who channeled the pain of a crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.

A British investment broker inherits his uncle's chateau and vineyard in Provence, where he spent much of his childhood. He discovers a new laid-back lifestyle as he tries to renovate the estate to be sold.

A rancher, his clairvoyant wife and their family face turbulent years in South America in this adaptation of Isabel Allende's best-seller.

1993 drama movie directed by Bille August

Set in 1930s London, this movie involves stage actors and actresses and their experiences with love and revenge.

2004 drama film directed by Sebastián Szabó

A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "find herself".

2010 American film directed by Ryan Murphy

Post-WWII Germany: Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Berg re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.

True story of the lifelong romance between novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, from their student days through her battle with Alzheimer's disease.

American pianist, singer and songwriter (1932-2020)

English recording artist; singer and songwriter

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