CTB

 I decided to read Corazón tan blanco. I was in Spain and saw a list of the 50 best books since Franco's death (50 years ago).  That was at the top. I had read only one by Marías before, El hombre sentimental, and was underwhelmed by the grey prose and banal soap-opera plot. 

1st chapter:  The suicide of a woman just back from her honeymoon. The widower will go on to marry the sister of the woman who shoots herself. The narrator is the son of the widower and this younger sister. The widower had been married and widowed once before. 

2nd chapter. The honeymoon of the narrator with Luisa. Both are translators / interpreters, so a lot of emphasis on language / communication. Luisa gets sick in Cuba. The narrator, standing on a balcony, is interpolated by a mulata woman who thinks he is her lover, in the next room in the hotel. The narrator eavesdrops through the wall separating between their two room. The action of the novel is displaced: we care more about the plot between Miriam (Cuban mulata) and Guillermo (Madrid Spaniard) than between Luisa and nameless narrator. Miriam wants Guillermo to kill his wife (a woman in Spain who is supposedly dying anyway.) The narrator reflects on the veracity of the Guillermo's story, and wonders what side to take. Miriam sings the same song the narrator's Cuban grandmother used to sing.  Everything seems doubled in the novel so far.  Two honeymoons, two sisters, two Cuban women singing the same song, two Spaniards in the same hotel. Two sick Spanish women (Luisa, and Guillermo's wife). A man who has been widowed twice.    

We don't know which side of the family the Cuban grandmother is on.  It is typical of Marías to have multiple, international settings for this novels. This is a moment when Spanish literature is self-consciously trying to be more international.  The idea is to write novels that work well in translation to other European languages, as Spain enters NATO and the EU and emerges from the Franco period of isolation. In fact, the book was a big hit in Germany. The narrator is multi-lingual and interprets at a high level (between heads of state). 

The prose is bit like Juan Benet, with long, serpentine sentences, but this style serves a different purpose than in Benet.