Alvaro Carrion Otero is a very regular guy - professor of physics at a university in Madrid, married, one young son, fourth of five children, used to leading a very uneventful life and, as he often tells himself, not even remotely as remarkable as his father, Julio Carrion Gonzalez. His father is a man who built up a real estate empire out of nothing, a poor farmer's son who became a millionaire with a loving wife and five kids, while invariably being so charming as to become instant friends with anyone who crossed his path. He is dead now, though, at the ripe age of 83, and at his burial, Alvaro notices a mysterious young woman, Raquel Fernandez Perea, who will prove to be the key that unlocks a whole new side of his father, a closet full of ugly secrets dating back to the years of the Spanish Civil War and shortly after.
If that sounds like a cliché beginning, it kind of is. The rest of the plot is not, so much. The Frozen Heart is a massive family chronicle (my paperback in Spanish has more than 1200 pages) of two Spanish families between the 1920s and 2005 - one with strong Republican sympathies and hence in exile from the Civil War of 1936-'39 until dictator Franco's death in 1975, the other in good standing with the fascist regime and increasingly well-off. Intertwined with that, the present-day storyline doesn't always hold up as well, although the main elements of that plot are cleverly developed, and do an excellent job of illustrating one of the most powerful points of the novel - how the profound traumas of one generation, in the eyes of their own children, can be reduced to annoying, endlessly repeated and profoundly uninteresting stories. Much like Art Spiegelman's brilliant graphic novel Maus, this book is made stronger by its contrast between the horrible experiences of the parents, and the way those separate them from their children who never lived through anything remotely comparable and cannot truly sympathize. It's only Alvaro and Raquel, and other members of the third generation growing up in a free Spain, who are profoundly interested in what happened to their grandparents - though not necessarily for the right reasons (as illustrated by Alvaro's friend Fernando, who manages to turn the story of his own grandfather's suffering during the Civil War into a near-guaranteed method of charming himself into any woman's pants).
The novel strikes a somewhat strange balance between accessibility and depth, with especially the present-day storyline reading as little more than a cliché romance at times, but on the other hand a bewildering array of flashbacks featuring dozens of characters, making it rather tricky at times to recall who is who and how they all relate to each other (fortunately you can find family trees online - and the Spanish custom of everyone having two last names, those of both the paternal and maternal grandfather, helps somewhat). Many readers will be exasperated by Grandes' rather particular way of embedding flashbacks within flashbacks, sometimes several layers deep, and then moving back and forth between them. To be sure the novel works better this way, and is more of a pageturner, than it would have if told in a straight line from past to present, but at times it does become difficult to keep track, and certain passages probably should have been cut altogether, especially in the last part of the novel. In addition, she has a habit of repeating certain key phrases regularly for emphasis - it works sometimes, but a few of them end up becoming meaningless mantras, especially the more flowery ones that were somewhat silly to begin with.
This is a very powerful novel, on the whole, carried by Grandes' strong feelings about the civil war that tore her country apart and left deep scars even after the eventual reconciliation, and her insights into how both those who remained in Spain and the exiles eventually found ways to move on with their lives, while still profoundly affected - with the past sometimes coming back with a vengeance, and sometimes dying a silent death. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to say it could have been even better with a stronger hand from the editor, with some relatively pointless scenes and many of these repetitions cut out. And the love story in the present day storyline was a little saccharine even for my taste - that, and remarkably cavalier about the concept of marital fidelity. The good, at times even superb, far outweighs the bad, in my opinion, but I can see how some might feel otherwise - especially those whose sympathies in the civil war are with the other side to begin with.
Oh, and just in case anyone else reads it and is left wondering, as I was, about the Civil War massacre of Arucas (on the island of Gran Canaria) as described in the book: recent research has proven the book's claims to be incorrect, the truth is slightly less gruesome. Yes, at least 19 civilians were indeed thrown into a pit by the fascist rebels and covered with highly caustic quicklime - but not alive, they had all been shot dead first. Most everything else is sadly true or at least amalgamated from real events (which doesn't mean that the novel claims to offer an unbiased history of the civil war, mind you).
