The Weight of the Heart by Susana Aikin

The Weight of the Heart by Susana Aikin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Weight of the Heart is a beautifully written story of three sisters, their domineering father and the house in Madrid where the girls came of age. The novel is told from the point of view of the youngest sister, Anna and within a unique situation that makes the story fascinating.

The story of the three sisters is expressed with clarity, as Susana Aikin carefully explores their relationships with each other, with their lovers, and most importantly, with their overbearing father. But that said, there is also another soul that is explored, the soul of a house.

The time has come for the sisters to sell the home they inherited. They put the house on the market after their father has been gone for a couple of years, but they don't find a buyer. All three of the women believe this failure is due to the fall-out from the conflicts and tragedies that occurred within those walls. Julia, the middle child, finds someone she believes can solve this issue.

“This time, though, Julia has gone over the top. She’s been hammering me [Anna] about bringing in this woman to cleanse our haunted house. And insisting that this person whom she calls a santera, an energy healer of sorts, and whom, mark you, she is picking up from a nursing home this morning, has supernatural powers capable of overcoming today’s conked-out real estate market and propitiating a sale. What word did she use? A limpieza?”

Anna, Julia, and the oldest sister, Marion, meet at the house with Delia, the santera, and her assistant, Constantine. Delia and Constantine begin the process of cleansing, while the sisters are left to ponder the memories the house contains. The most important of these are the ways their father affected their lives.

“His love was in his fight to provide for us: food, a beautiful house, a bountiful education. His gifts, money and things money could buy. But his passion could only be channeled through jealousy, through possession. And loving him back was difficult, a balancing act between standoffish devotion and a terror of disappointing him. Even as girls we knew that we had a wounded animal for a father.”

Although The Weight of the Heart explores Anna's dysfunctional family in a captivating manner, there is more to Susana Aikin's novel. The calm, dedication of Delia, the santera, to her spiritual mission is riveting. So are the relationships of the sisters with their lovers, each unique, yet sharing a common tragedy. And, as with Aikin's first novel, We Shall See the Sky Sparkling, her poetic prose is a joy to read.


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