The Weight of the Heart by Susana Aikin (Review)

Susana Aikin’s The Weight of the Heart examines the familial bonds, often torrential, irrational and unspoken, that shape our lives. The story is told through the experience of Anna, the youngest of three sisters and the favorite of an overbearing father. Aikin’s rendering of the relationships between the sisters is reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend — their deep love for each other, the fractures from their father’s destructive influence, and most notably the wounds from which they live. At times her writing style invokes Ferrante as well, engulfing the reader in the passions, obsessions and revelations of her characters. 

Aikin’s setting provides the perfect vessel for the angst of her characters and their desperate attempts to shrug off the suffocating mantle of the past. The story unfolds in the sisters’ childhood home in Madrid, now fallen into a state of Gothic disrepair. It is a house drenched in sorrow. A year has passed since their English-born father’s death, himself a lifelong widower after the mother’s death from pneumonia when Anna was still a young child. The house is crowded with dusty antiques, relics of ancient civilizations, the father’s rigorously curated art collection, and the haunted whisperings of unfinished business.

The “hauntings” are gradually revealed to us through Anna’s flashbacks of a father whose impossible expectations extended to every quarter, from the preparation of his preferred British recipes (symbolic of his rejection of “third-world” Spain) to the suitability of his daughters’ lovers. One wonderfully rendered scene captures the breathless, high-stakes preparation of a cup of English tea by Nanny, the Spanish caretaker who remained after the mother’s death to manage the household and raise the three sisters. Tea leaves and boiling water are combined with surgical precision, followed by a treacherous ascent upstairs to the father’s study. If even a drop trickles from cup to saucer, the father will declare the tea ruined and wave Nanny from the study. Such rich characterizations (and there are many) are a joy to read.

The father’s tight-fisted control defines the lives of his daughters, either in the flowering of revolt or conformity. Its bitter fruit manifests as well in the three women’s virtual estrangement as adults. They reunite for an unlikely spiritual “cleansing” of the house by a priestess from the Santería tradition to expedite the sale of the house. It’s a wonderful irony that the spirit of a father who epitomized British colonialism is to be exorcised with a tradition that involves copious amounts of rum and the sweeping of coconuts throughout the rooms. The priestess is another of Aiken’s rich characters, both trickster and wise woman, one minute a doddering octogenarian, the next a keen observer of human behavior and vibrant summoner of the South Wind.    

At times I felt frustrated by the sisters’, especially Anna’s, inability to throw off the chains of the father’s emotional tyranny, a version of why doesn’t she just leave him? only between father and daughter. Anna’s passion for theater is cast aside because of her father and, later, the love of her life. But Aiken’s skillful portrayal of the flawed beauty of her characters, their corrupted but salvageable humanity, kept me deeply invested in their fates until the end.   

Learn more about The Weight of the Heart and Susana Aiken’s other novels here.