Noel’s Reviews > A Heart So White > Status Update

“…calm us and also to hold us. That’s how most married people and most couples sleep or think they sleep, the two turn to the same side when they say goodnight, so that one has his or her back to the other throughout the whole night, when he or she wakes up startled from a nightmare, or is unable to get to sleep, or is suffering from a fever or feels alone and abandoned in the darkness, they have only to turn round and see before them the face of the person protecting them, the person who will let themselves be kissed on any part of the face that is kissable (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks, the whole face) or perhaps, half-asleep, will place a hand on their shoulder to calm them, or to hold them, or even to cling to them.”

Ahhh, I’m definitely going to finish it after this chapter!

So glad that you changed your mind now you are in, Noel...once tuned in to his style, I couldn't put the book down anymore, hypnotized by the rhythm, the maelstrom of thoughts.

Thanks, Ilse :) Marías reminds me of a Schopenhauer passage I posted earlier that the art of the “highest” and “most noble” novels “lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life.” The way Marías does it does irritate me at times, even though that’s exactly what you loved about the book—“the maelstrom of thoughts” (“on the narrowest of external foundations”—Schopenhauer again). I like the book most when I can clearly imagine a scene, like when (just before this quote) Juan deliberately mistranslates the conversation between the politicians and seduces Luisa in the process (after that long Bernhardian tirade about translators’ and interpreters’ work, which is what made me want to put it down). Also a bit later when Juan’s father calls him into a room to advise him the day he marries Luisa.