Los enamoramientos

by Javier Marías

«La última vez que vi a Miguel Desvern o Deverne fue también la última que lo vio su mujer, Luisa, lo cual no dejó de ser extraño y quizá injusto, ya que ella era eso, su mujer, y yo era en cambio una desconocida…»

Así comienza Los enamoramientos, la nueva novela de Javier Marías, consagrado como uno de los mejores novelistas contemporáneos. María Dolz, la narradora y protagonista, sólo supo su nombre «cuando apareció su foto en el periódico, apuñalado y medio descamisado y a punto de convertirse en un muerto: lo último de lo que se debió de dar cuenta fue de que lo acuchillaban por confusión y sin causa».

Con una prosa profunda y cautivadora, esta novela reflexiona sobre el estado de enamoramiento, considerado casi universalmente como algo positivo e incluso redentor a veces, tanto que parece justificar casi todas las cosas: las acciones nobles y desinteresadas, pero también los mayores desmanes y ruindades.

Los enamoramientos es también un libro sobre la impunidad y sobre la horrible fuerza de los hechos; sobre la inconveniencia de que los muertos pudieran volver, por mucho que se los haya llorado y que en apariencia nada se deseara tanto como su regreso, o al menos que siguieran vivos; también sobre la imposibilidad de saber nunca la verdad cabalmente, ni siquiera la de nuestro pensamiento, oscilante y variable siempre.

Genres: Fiction, Spain, Mystery, Spanish Literature, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction

370 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Javier Marías was a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist. His work has been translated into 42 languages. Born in Madrid, his father was the philosopher Julián Marías, who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing Franco. Parts of his childhood were spent in the United States, where his father taught at various institutions, including Yale University and Wellesley College. His mother died when Javier was 26 years old. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.

Marías began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga", one of the short stories in While the Women are Sleeping (2010), was written when he was just 14. He wrote his first novel, "Los dominios del lobo" (The Dominions of the Wolf), at age 17, after running away to Paris.

Marías operated a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also wrote a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column "La Zona Fantasma" is published in the monthly magazine The Believer.

In 1997 Marías won the Nelly Sachs Prize.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young woman (30-ish) works in a publishing house in Madrid. She has coffee every morning and for several years overhears conversations of a couple with their two young children who frequent the same café. They never interact but she thinks of them as “the perfect couple.” She doesn’t know it yet but they notice her too and call her “the prudent young woman.”

One day she sees in the newspaper that the married man was murdered by a crazy knife-wielding homeless man. Sometime later she sees the widow by herself and goes up to her and offers condolences and eventually meets her at her home. At the widow’s home she meets a friend of the family and gets romantically involved with him.

This is where the real story starts. She learns that there’s a lot more to the murder. Her world is rocked and what she comes to know creates a number of moral dilemmas for her. It’s a story of love, death, fate, memory, guilt, obsession, chance and coincidence. It’s a study too of a woman going through the stages of grief.



Marias may be the best contemporary author from Spain. (I phrase it that way to distinguish between writers from Spain and Latin American Spanish authors). I’ve read and reviewed two other works by Marias - Written Lives and Dark Back of Time. Some example of his writing and passages that I liked:

“Writers are, for the most part, strange individuals. They get up in exactly the same state of mind as when they went to bed, thinking about imaginary things, which, despite being purely imaginary, take up most of their time.”

When one suffers a misfortune, “the effects on the victim far outlast the patience of those prepared to listen and accompany her, unconditional support never lasts very long once it has become tinged with monotony.”

“The only people who do not fail or let us down are those who are snatched from us, the only ones we don’t drop are those who abruptly disappear and so have no time to cause us pain or disappointment.”

“…there is nothing more tempting than to surrender yourself to someone else, even if only in your imagination, and to make his problems your own and to submerge yourself in his existence, which, because it is not yours, seems easier to bear.”

Despite the heavy theme, Marias writes with humor:

Of a group of writers she takes to dinner on business: “…most of the guests looked strangely like flamenco artistes, and my main fear was that they might whip out their guitars from some strange hiding place and start singing loudly, between courses.”

His upper lip became caught on his gums and “he made some rather strange rodent-like movements with his lips.”

“…he was wearing an argyle sweater, the kind of glasses a rapist or a maniac might wear…”

This is prescient, written in 2011 long before any recent elections: “…the greatest imbecile and the greatest rogue [may] gain a landslide victory from a population mesmerized by baseness or perhaps driven by a suicidal desire to be deceived…”



Marias gives us some local color of Madrid and scatters references to works by Balzac and Dumas. This is well-written and very literary. I’m giving it a 5 and adding it to my favorites.

Photo of cafe in Madrid from wheretraveler.com
Photo of the author from newstatesman.com

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was moving this week, so I'm farther away from this than I wanted to be when I wrote this, but I can assure you that the strongest of my impressions have lasted enough to give you the gist of why I was so disappointed in this.

My major issue is, overall, that this is the sort of book that gives literary fiction a bad name. This is exactly the sort of thing that is the basis for pretension puncturing parodies with melodramatic lighting and unnecessarily florid language that people point to when you ask them why they don't want to read. This is that book, where people sit around in half lit rooms and have silent, weirdly distant sex in between pontificating to each other unbearably about philosophy. Moreover, it is the sort of dated philosophy where women still have lives that artfully revolve around men and men have the sort of Freudian, idea-driven obsessions that were fashionable to write about in the middle of the last century. The sort surrounded by cigarettes and brandy and intense gazes and five o'clock shadows. You know what I mean.

You know, that's it. That's what bothers me. This book seems like such a pose. Sure, there are a few things in here that rang true. I've had some thoughts in here, almost verbatim, that he writes down. But they are so banal, it's like going to a fortune teller and being totally amazed when she tells you that she can feel that you had trouble in your adolescence or made some bad choices with alcohol in college. So I don't know how much credit you can give it for that. It all felt like such a sham, like a set that Marias threw down that he felt was appropriate for some things he thought he wanted to say.

I mean, the thoughts he expressed went from banal to disturbing eventually, but that was okay because there was no suspense involved. The narrator guessed everything involved with the turn to the disturbing long before it came true (and seriously everything she guessed about a situation she knew nothing about involving people she knew nothing about was correct!). And if she didn't guess it, don't worry, it was condescendingly described to her in detail later. In case you needed more help still, no worries again, if the author thought the point was particularly important or just had a nice ring to it, you can be sure that it will be repeated, both verbatim and paraphrased, just so we Get It.

As for the characters, I didn't care for anyone involved, except for the monumentally screwed over Luisa, who doesn't get enough screen time for me to form the connection I wanted with her. The others are unremarkable, monsters, or overdone archetypes. The narrator was especially tiresome. So many of the emotional edges are blunted by the subdued manner of expression taken on here. The whole story is made into an almost theoretical discussion, like it is a parlor game that is happening to somebody else. I use "almost" advisedly, because of course it is not, and that is supposed to be part of the disturbing thing about it. But it wasn't- Marias was so much more interested in writing pages of rambling discourse about his ideas about the way the people experience grief, loss and obsession that he made his characters mouthpieces, rather than people.

If you stepped back and away from the substance of their discourse, the defining characteristic of the narrator is passive aggression and timidity. The defining characteristic of the villain is sadly misguided self-delusion. The major secondary character is simply a self-aggrandizing fool of a stereotype. They are mere chess pieces, placed at a certain vantage point and then given the thoughts that are most appropriate for them, divided up among them. And many of those thoughts do not sound natural to the characters, if they were actual people. Luckily, they are not. They are statues experiencing a Major Life Moment that Marias has Thoughts on, who speak for him, in an omniscient narrator voice that sounds the same no matter who is speaking.

He might just as well have written a short essay "On Grief and Obsession" and been done with it. The plot was close enough to a ripped from the headlines sort of thing that he could have done this as an examination of the motives of a real person. Did he need the cover of fiction so that the thoughts couldn't be mistaken for his own? Even though obviously, if they have occurred to him, they are? That's a weird sort of thought policing. Maybe it's a sin of the genre-boxing thing we do with authors- if you're famous as a novelist, then you should only write novels, that is the only structure through which you can express your thoughts and have people be interested in buying them. So you bend and twist the thing you really want to do into the novel form, however ill it fits. Maybe that's what was going on here. I wonder if some of the pseudo-intellectual banal thoughts would have seem fresh if they were examined in a True Crime sort of spirit. There were certainly some unsympathetic but I would imagine fairly common thoughts about what happens to the memory of people after they die, as well as the thought process of people who want something so badly they are willing to justify it however they can. It's interesting that in order to express them he put them in the mouth of a sociopathic monster and a person out of her mind with grief, so she can't be held responsible for what she's saying- again... it feels like he was disclaiming responsibility for unattractive thoughts. I don't think you can really argue that he was doing careful character building, not with what he spent the majority of his page allocation on. So that must be it? What other excuse is there for a character focused novel with a mission statement at the top of it, basically, declaring that it is a character study, to be so poor at building characters?

I am trying to be generous here in my thoughts about his motives or what went wrong. Too many people have told me too many excellent things about him for him to really write like this all the time. I have already been told that he has at least two books that are better than this. Can anyone back that up for me? It would be a shame if this was really the best he had to offer. Does he write like this all the time? Please say no!

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review is going to be a tricky undertaking. You see, I found the writing to be remarkable! And there is no doubt in my mind that Javier Marías has been gifted with loads of perception regarding human behavior and psychology. There’s also the fact that I was completely grabbed from the very first sentence. That compulsion to keep reading lasted for quite a while. But then, after the first third to midway through, my attention started to waver. I would become totally engrossed in some keen insight, and then that idea would be taken a bit too far and I would lose interest. I had to take a break and let my mind rest. Upon picking it back up, I was once again fully invested in the story. Later, a similar idea would be presented, and I found that it felt somewhat repetitive, or worse yet, like beating a dead horse. Then I reached the last third of the book – and I was off and running again. I was all in until the end. So there’s the dilemma!

“The last time I saw Miguel Desvern was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much as a single word.”

From the first page, Marías sets the tone for a rather provocative mystery. It’s told in this first person narration throughout. As usual, with this point of view, the reader is never sure exactly where reality ends and imagination begins – particularly when we have a teaser like this right from the start. How on earth would our narrator, a young woman named María, be able to recount a story about a man she had never met?! Needless to say, her telling of these events and the other people involved is as muddy as one would expect. There’s a ton of speculation on her part. There are entire pages devoted to her idea of what someone else must have been thinking. This went so far that I often had to make sure there wasn’t someone else actually speaking to her at the moment. That these were indeed just her “reenactments” of the events of sorts. Her own private guesswork, if you will. She’s a big analyzer, and one often wonders how much she projects of herself onto her meditations about the others.

“I used to wonder what they talked about or told each other – how could they possibly have so much to say, given that they went to bed and got up together and would presumably keep each other informed of their thoughts and activities – I only ever caught fragments of their conversation, or just the odd word or two.”

There are really just a small number of characters that inhabit this novel. Besides María, there is the married couple referred to in the quote above, Miguel and Luisa, as well as their close family friend, Javier. In my opinion, it begins with a bit of voyeurism, as María frequents the coffee shop where she fantasizes about Miguel and Luisa. They become a stable presence in her life, one that she depends on, regardless of the fact they never speak to one another. When they no longer show up one morning, her world is disrupted. We quickly learn the reasons for this and for the premise of the entire novel, which galloped away at a nice pace for me initially. She is eventually drawn into Luisa’s life. I won’t dwell on the details any further, but needless to say the title is quite fitting. There is more than just one infatuation here, as well as a perceptive examination of death, grief, relationships and perhaps even obsession.

“… sooner or later, the grieving person is left alone when she has still not finished grieving or when she’s no longer allowed to talk about what remains her only world, because other people find that world of grief unbearable, repellent. She understands that for them sadness has a social expiry date…”

The concept of truth is put under the microscope for some thorough scrutiny. I had a sense the author is playing with the reader, challenging him or her to question everything written on these pages. He also takes jabs at writers themselves and what one takes away from a novel or perhaps even a film. The line between reality and fantasy is blurred. The reader has to come to his or her own conclusions. What is truth and how can we ever be sure that what is whispered in our ear is the truth, a lie, or some other person’s version of the truth? Our own expectations and desires often get in the way of how we interpret what we see and hear.

“The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.”

The more I think about this, the more I realize how much I admired the skill in the writing, the intellect of the author, and the clever observations. Despite any problems I had with what at times felt like a tendency to overanalyze, all on the part of the narrator, I still found it thought-provoking. Don’t go into this expecting some sort of typical whodunit (I did not), because it’s really not that at all. There is tension to the story but not in an edge-of-your-seat kind of way. It’s all about the psychology here this time, and I can get on board with that!

“There was something improbable and unreal about the whole situation, like a dark, defamatory dream that weighs unbearably on our soul…”

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

A murderer, nothing more.

Truth is not always an easy thing to come by. Any event that occurs reaches our ears and eyes from a vast assortment of new media, eyewitnesses, and other second-hand accounts, each with their own unique perspectives and agendas that all encode the same message into infinitely variable packages of information. We all become amateur detectives, sifting through the various accounts to decipher what we choose to believe, and thus creating our own unique perspectives of an event that we will inevitably pass along through our interactions and conversations with others. Javier Marías’ 2013 novel, Los Enamoramientos—re-dressed as The Infatuations to best accommodate the English language—is an incredible exploration of the detective work we all must undergo when attempting to deduct any semblance of truth about even the most seemingly common of tragedies that cross our paths. What is truly astounding is Marías' ability to create a novel with the exciting two-faced dealings and baffling plot twists typically found in fast action, blood-soaked thrillers out of a collaboration of scenes mainly comprised of late-night dialogues over a glass of wine in a quiet living room. Through a re-examination of Marías' standard themes of mortality and language, The Infatuations explores with prodigious depth the effects of death on the surrounding survivors lives as well as the labyrinthine complexities of trying to understand material reality through the fallible and distorted words of others.

Irreversible, unpredictable death casts its grim shadow across every page of the novel. Maria, the young female narrator working for a modern publishing house learns that the husband of a loving and attractive couple whom she has studied and admired from afar for years during her daily breakfast at a Madrid café has been brutally stabbed to death by a homeless man in a vacant street beneath the indifferent night sky. The reader follows Maria as the lives of the friends and family to the deceased Miguel enfolding around her while she plunges inwards towards the murder, each bestowing upon her their unique attitudes regarding death. Through the widow we see experience the loneliness and the shock of having an essential extension of their livelihoods stricken from existence, while through Javier—the deceased’s closest friend—we are treated to a seemingly calloused yet realistic perspective that those left alive must soldier forth and not bemoan past sorrows that inevitably shape us into the person we are at present.

We mourn our father, for example, but we are left with a legacy, his house, his money and his worldly goods, which we would have to give back to him were he to return, which would put us in a very awkward position and cause us great distress. We might mourn a wife or a husband, but sometimes we discover, although this may take a while, that we live more happily and more comfortably without them or, if we are not too advanced in years, that we can begin anew, with the whole of humanity at our disposal, as it was when we were young; the possibility of choosing without making the old mistakes; the relief of not having to put up with certain annoying habits, because there is always something that annoys us about the person who is always there, at our side or in front or behind or ahead, because marriage surrounds and encircles. We mourn a great writer or a great artist when he or she dies, but there is a certain joy to be had from knowing that the world has become a little more vulgar and a little poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised; that he or she is no longer there to underline our own relative mediocrity; that talent in general has taken another step towards disappearing from the face of the earth or slipping further back into the past, from which it should never emerge, where it should remain imprisoned so as not to affront us except perhaps retrospectively, which is less wounding and more bearable. I am speaking of the majority, of course, not everyone.

While we mourn the lives that have been snuffed out, Javier posits that we must look to the future, the future left to those still retaining a pulse, and make the best of what we have. Our lives are a culmination of each event we experience and our lives are fragile and ephemeral, we should not waste the opportunities we have before the great mystery of death closes it’s inevitable curtains on our story. This viewpoint is initially jarring, however, as light is shed on the motives and character of Javier, we see that the opinions one holds reflect those that are in the best interest of the beholder—we rationalize our reality to accommodate our actions. What is aesthetically pleasing of this European edition of the novel is the thick black pages that precede and follow the novel, as well as the black hardback, which seem to reflect Javier’s presumed belief of death as being a void-like eternity mirroring the time we spend before birth. The novel itself then becomes the interactions of life between the bookends of eternity.

While we miss and long for those gone before us, the return of a person thought deceased may not be the happy reunion we all would fantasize it to be. Through a dissection of Balzac’s Le Colonel Chabert, Javier expounds the disastrous implications of such a from-the-grave return to Maria.

The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others dois to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it is too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all.

Our deaths become just another event, and life is made for moving on. Maria also offers her own dissertation into the return of one thought dead, reciting passages form The Three Musketeers when Athos’ fleur-de-lys adorned wife returns, seemingly from the grave in which he thought he had put her, as a sinful, murderous villain aligned with the enemy. We all play our part in the human comedy, but sometimes when our role has been written out of the lives of others, it is best to remain in the wings and not to reemerge, for our return, brining with it a heavy weight of former selves, no longer has a place in their lives now altered and reshaped by the hands of time. What is important to note is that these are truths held by the characters, and for reasons held hidden in their hearts but offer glimpses into their true motivations. Maria knows her affair with Javier has an expiration date, and that his real aim is with Luisa, the widow, for why else would he preach the importance of putting the dead behind us?

I would never know more than what he told me, and so I would never know anything for sure…

Language is central to any work of Marías, and the plot is a convenient vessel in which he can explore the intricacies of words. Jorge Luis Borges once said that ‘language is an artificial system which has nothing to do with reality.’ ¹ Borges often examined the dualities of existence, the universe of physical material and action, and the universe of words, the latter being the method in which we attempts to convey the former. However, language can only probe essence of physical reality, can only build a model or imperfect mirror of it, and can never accurately reconstruct reality aside from giving a cathartic experience. With The Infatuations, Marías explores such imperfections and their effect on our attempts to reach any sort of truth. When someone speaks, they encode their message, their beliefs and intentions, into words, which are they decoded by the receiver. Each party exists in their own realm of perspectives built from preconceived opinions, agendas and experiences that must inevitably interact with their packaging and unpacking of any message, refurbishing it to our particular (and often subconscious) needs. Each message we receive shapes our opinions, from framing a new idea in our mid, reinforcing a previous belief, to offering contradictory or supplemental information that will alter our previous opinions. Marías delivers his novel in a method that takes the reader on a turbulent ride of altering opinions all filtered through the mind of the narrator. Long ‘what if’ scenarios play out in her mind, lengthy and engrossing enough for the reader to lower their guard and allow the information to shape their opinions, and the opinions formed then meet with actual interactions of the character. The preconceived notions constructed towards characters like Javier latch on to anything congruous and gives the reader a sense that they understand his motives and intentions. However, once new information accrues, we must reassess what we know, or think we know, as the truth wiggles and squirms just beyond our outstretched fingertips.

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true.

As soon as we attempt to place material reality into words, we create a story, a unique perspective on an event tainted by our words and opinions. Even recounting mundane events forms a narrative of events that give a spin on reality. Truth is an unobtainable purity, like an asymptote it is something that we can reach for but never truly touch; the closest we can come to it through all our reshaping of opinions with each new version we encounter, is simply our own perspective of truth which, due to language, can never fully be the ideal 'truth' of events. Maria, and the reader must question any new information that is told to them, or heard in fragments through a closed bedroom door. What becomes particularly perplexing is realizing that everything the reader receives only occurs through the mind of Maria, and the reader must then not only run through the possible motives of those speaking to Maria, but also assess the motives and perspectives of Maria herself.

El enamoramiento - the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I’m referring to the noun, the concept… it’s very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness. That’s the determining factor, they break down our objectivity and disarm us in perpetuity, so that we can in over every dispute…

Who can be sure that any character is acting rationally, speaking truthfully, assessing any situation accurately, when their eyes are clouded by infatuation? While a murder and the mystery of why it occurred is central to the plot, the answers are superfluous; it is the examination of the attempt towards the answers, the probing of truth, that Marías parades in eloquent speech and ponderous musings for the reader to satisfy themselves upon. It is the deduction of each jigsaw piece, the faith in our ability to read others, the emotion of the chase and the game, that shines in incredible glory from each page of the novel. The reader is constantly met with discussions of perspectives and different ‘versions’ of truth, from varying translations and editions of Don Quixote, contradictory eyewitness testimonies of Miguel’s murder, to interesting artistic interpretations of Adam And Eve.

As in each Marías novel, the narrator and those around them are compelled to spill their stories; there is an utter compulsion to speak and let their version of the truth be heard. In Marías ‘ phenomenal novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, he highlights this desire to step out of the shadows and share what lurks within the dark recesses of the mind and heart.

[T]hey have merely been overcome or motivated by weariness and a desire to be whole, by their inability to continue lying or keeping silent, to go on remembering what they experienced and did as well as what they imagined, to go on remembering their transformed or invented lives as well as those they actually lived, to forget what really happened and to replace it with a fiction.

These truths, or half-truths, are itching to come to life, and once they are spoken, they become the property of all those who have heard them, free to be reshaped by perspectives and passed along through endless permutations of fact and fiction. As Maria recounts her journey inward, she tells of characters as they attempt to distance themselves from the murder. However, can putting more versions of the truth between oneself and an event truly remove them from the violence? Does distancing oneself through chance remove responsibility? What is especially interesting to examine is that each opinion expressed is a reflection of the Teller. Maria, a character of Javier Marias, often paints in broad strokes while describing the motives and inner workings of women. This is initially troublesome, especially as women are depicted as subservient beings that pine after men and hang on their every action, giving the book a bit of a sexist taste. However, when remembering that these opinions belong to those of Maria, a character that just so happens to be rather submissive and infatuated as best serves the nature of the novel, it becomes understandable that she would assume that her feelings and actions are a generic representation of other women. As expressed in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, ‘our idea of justice changes according to our needs, and we always think that what we need is equivalent to what is just.’ ² Maria’s opinions on women serve to support her own needs, justifying her actions by believing that it is just the way people act.

While the journey is a bit rocky and certain aspects seem distasteful or cumbersome when they first occur, this is a novel that rewards the patient as everything is eventually weaved together to form an impressively poignant final amalgamation of the individual parts. Marías once again proves himself a master of language, with fantastic flowing discussions of death and carefully crafted sentences that ensure their linguistic subtleties will survive the repacking of translation. There are a few comical moments discussing authors, and a few vitriolic stabs at pretentious contemporary writing trends, that bring Marías’ own job as a translator at a publishing house to mind and wonder where his inspirations came from (there are a few jabs seemingly directed at himself as well that are sure to bring a smile). Despite having a slow burning story packed with philosophical reflections, this novel is full of incredible twists and turns that will keep the reader feverishly flipping the pages. This is a fantastic novel, but is best suited to those who are already familiar with Javier Marías.
4/5

‘There’s nothing like sharing round the guilt if you want to emerge from a murky situation smelling of roses.’

¹ A translation of this clip The following discussion on Borges in this review relies heavily on ideas expressed in stories such as Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
² As well as re-examining several themes from TitBToM, fans of the author will be glad to see the return of Ruibérriz de Torres (also spotlighted in Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico). Marias seemingly makes Madrid his own Yoknapatawpha through his reoccurring characters and themes that bring the streets and underworld of his fictional Madrid to life and allow the reader repeat visits.



I highly recommend reading Mike's (who first introduced me to this wonderful author), as well as Garima's fantastic reviews. It was a pleasure reading and discussing this book together.

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

“… lo seguía queriendo y mi conocimiento de lo que había hecho me daba asco; no él, sino mi conocimiento.”

Admiro a Javier Marías, lo admiro como novelista, aunque no fuera una admiración a primera vista, admiro la valentía que muestra en sus artículos periodísticos pese a no comulgar siempre con su contenido, hasta disfruto de sus arrebatos incendiarios en contra de las tonterías, políticamente correctas o no, con las que tanto majadero se pone en ridículo, pero no siento por él ni de lejos ese enamoramiento del que aquí nos habla, ese capaz de hacerme sentir conforme con cualquier migaja que me ofrezca, que me obligue a interesarme por todo aquello por lo que él muestre interés, no siento esa debilidad, esa enfermedad del enamoramiento que me haría rendirme a cualquier cosa que de él viniera. Ni falta que hace, me diría él con toda la razón del mundo, ni falta que hace.

Pero así es, no me conformo con estas migajas que para mí han sido “Los enamoramientos”, por mucho que me haya divertido en ciertos momentos, por mucho que haya disfrutado de algunos de sus soliloquios. Me tiene acostumbrado a más y no me puedo conformar con menos, no con él.

Todos aquellos que le seguimos sabemos cómo será el cicerone que nos guíe en cada novela —aunque en este caso sea una mujer no esperábamos otra cosa—, un narrador-personaje obsesivo con los detalles, con las palabras, con los gestos, con sus significados, con sus intenciones, con las relaciones con otros detalles, con otras palabras, con otros gestos, dando pie casi cada uno de ellos a un pensamiento, a una explicación, a un relato, un afluente que ya no es el río pero por el que fluyen las mismas aguas; un aficionado a subirse al púlpito para despacharse a gusto contra modos y maneras, enemigo a muerte de la estupidez que tanto abunda, más feroz cuanto más popular sea, y cuya voz, sin apenas variaciones, irá prestando a todos y a cada uno de los personajes de la novela que gustosos completarán, matizarán, ampliarán el discurso de nuestro siempre educado, culto, elegante y hasta algo pedante cicerone. Todo ello envuelto en una trama mínima, la justa y necesaria para el provechoso desarrollo del discurso que toque. Algo que no me molesta en absoluto, coincido plenamente con Lobo Antunes cuando dice aquello de que “la intriga muchas veces no es más que el clavo del cual se cuelgan los cuadros”.

Pues bien, será esa inquebrantable seguridad en la que vive quién se siente amado en esos términos, mayor aun si además no corresponde en la misma medida, que no he apreciado mucho esfuerzo, fundamentalmente en la primera mitad de la novela, por conseguir que esa mínima trama engarce de forma hábil y verosímil (aunque la vida esté llena de verdades inverosímiles, eso no lo hace menos bochornoso, por utilizar una expresión suya), las perlas que, sin duda, también esta obra contiene, aunque estén tal mal acompañadas de un buen surtido de baratijas, más abundantes que lo habitual, trivialidades que no dejan de serlo por muy bella que sea la forma de exponerlas ni por muchas vueltas, rodeos y perspectivas que sobre ellas y de ellas se dé. Es más, qué bajón en el discurso cuando por fin coge empaque la trama en la segunda mitad. Quizá en parte porque las cegueras del enamoramiento, punto fuerte de esta segunda parte, me interesan menos que la tragedia que significa la muerte, tema que centra la primera.

Y tiene razón Marías al afirmar que pasado un tiempo da igual lo que ocurra en las novelas que “Lo interesante son las posibilidades e ideas que nos inoculan y traen a través de sus casos imaginarios”, sobre todo a los que, como yo, somos tirando a pez. Pero es que en esta ocasión mucho de lo que en ella sucede suena forzado —algo que con gran disgusto leí que achacaba al mismísimo Zola—, muy traído por los pelos, tanto que el autor mismo se vio en la necesidad de dar más de una vez un sinfín de explicaciones que, lamentablemente, más que desenredar el entuerto hacían más patente lo artificioso de lo explicado. Tanto que, dado el sentimiento que con el autor tengo, llego a pensar que fue intencionado, que es buscada la parodia de esta vida estúpida, tan llena de casualidades inauditas, de razones disparatadas, de rebuscadas situaciones, donde tiene cabida “lo inverosímil y aun lo imposible, lo que ni siquiera cabía en el cálculo de probabilidades por el que nos regimos”. O, y esto ya es rizar el rizo, soy capaz de ver en “Los enamoramientos” nada más que un mero anuncio publicitario de la edición que hizo Reino de Redonda de algunas “nouvelles” de Balzac, algo que, de hecho, es en cualquier caso. Ni siquiera, y ya termino, tuvo el detalle de agradarme con el final justiciero que yo hubiera preferido arrojándome un buen puñado de la impunidad de la que tantos y tantos hechos disfrutan en la vida real.

Y a pesar de todo seguiré leyendo a Marías, no quiero que esta lectura sea “lo único verdadero, y además definitivo” por ser precisamente lo último que de él lea, no quiero, como tan bien se argumenta en la novela, que este sea el final que todo lo enturbie, que todo el pasado contamine. Al fin y al cabo…

“Sí, es muy grave, es muy grave. Pero es él, aún es él… Un hombre normal en esencia, que había hecho una sola excepción.”

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a delicately eerie depth of intelligence and using a hypnotic style Javier Marías weaves a skillful and deceiving story set in the heart of modern Madrid involving a murder, the reasons for, and the aftermath. But for anyone hoping for a thrilling crime mystery you will end up disappointed, and I feel some negative reviews are not wholly the fault of the book itself, but rather people are to believe it's something along those lines when clearly it is not. This is not a thriller, no where near it, yes there are some taut moments here and there but generally speaking it's built more on the personal themes of love, fate, our human nature for desire and real-life fantasy's and there consequences. Could it be just a tale of love then?, yes and no would be the answer, although it sits far better in this corner than that of any murder mystery.

In terms of characters there really are only a few, giving it a intimate and closed in dimension where everything takes place either in the confinements of bedrooms, living area's or to start off with a café, which is the point we see through the eyes of María Dolz who frequents here on a daily basis before going to work, and comes to notice the same attractive couple (Miguel & Luisa) who appear at the same café everyday. She starts to become transfixed with them, visualizing what their lives must be like, she sees this as part of her daily routine, until one day they fail to appear, and the following days after. María would learn that the man was murdered in the street in an apparent knife attack by a crazed homeless man. After seeing Luisa in the café again one day she approaches to offer her condolences, strangely she opens up to María and they almost immediately seem like friends.

I say there were only a few characters, and that would soon be whittled down to just two for the most part, María Dolz and the shady but desirable Díaz-Varela, who was a very close friend of Luisa's murdered husband. Both become attracted after a chance meeting and the desire for each other takes hold for a while. But when she secretly overhears a conversation between Díaz-Varela and an unknown figure at his home María's cozy world would chillingly become lost in a battle of wits and deception, could she have been imagining things?, if not just what on earth has Díaz-Varela been up to?, how can she suddenly change her feeling for him in the blink of an eye? and more importantly is she safe in his presence?. In a mesmerizing final third things do borderline with suspense, at least to some degree, where what is to be believed or not believed for Maria takes center stage, and the fact of an open ended finale leaves you pondering. But as stated before this is an exploration of the desirable psyche, and depths of love and mortality. An impressive piece of writing indeed.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Infatuations", written by Spanish writer, Javier Marias,
begins with a murder. It's brilliantly and seductively written - with mesmerizing passages on every page. There was even a very powerful passage about a mother - who clearly loves her children - but just can't cope with them at the moment - wishes she didn't have to - as they weighed too much on her. Her husband was dead - with two small children ---( this passage went on - powerfully - for pages). I thought about my mother, when I, too, was 4 years old... and her husband - my dad - was dead. The writing was so 'all-knowing', that I got inside my mother's head getting inside my 4 year old head! It was spooky-truthful.

This is very first sentence of "The Infatuations", captured my attention immediately:
"The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time his wife,
Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much a single word".

The aura is eerie....with a slow unraveling suspense. Themes...'layers-deep' about love, life, envy, morality, .... with penetrating long reflective paragraphs.

Maria Dolz, flawless narrator for this story, is a publishers editor. She is fascinated by a 'perfect couple' she observes daily in a cafe every morning over breakfast. She enjoys watching how happy they look together. She idolizes them both. One day they don't show up. Later she learns the husband was murdered. Later.... she becomes friends with the wife.

It's not a long book -no reason to spell out the details....but it's the WRITING - THE FEW CHARACTERS - and the entire TONE of this novel that had me FULLY INTRIGUED.
Captivating!!! I liked this book VERY MUCH!

[Isabel Allende · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una novela literaria que requiere un lector atento. Tiene suspenso, pero el argumento es lo de menos, lo que más interesa es la filosofía del autor.

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had such high hopes for this. The reviews have been glowing. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. And I've been trying to read more translations. At first the premise and subject matter seemed promising - and the first few extended conversations were quite interesting.

But then ... Blah blah blah. Blah Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah. The talking and talking and talking and then thinking (internal talking) and more talking and more talking. Please - I'm drowning in the middle of sentences that are paragraphs long. And paragraphs that seem to reach to infinity. And then by the time something did actually happen, I didn't care anymore. About anyone or anything in the book. I kept going - feeling that I'd already invested too much time and brainpower to quit - but it was a slog. If I had to do it over I would have abandoned it at 100 pages. Blah.

[Nada Elshabrawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

من نوع الروايات اللي يفاجئ القارئ برقته وحلاوته. سعدت بـ غراميات مارياس لأنها جت في وقتها تمامًا.

[Garima · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.

The questions about life and death are quite contrasting. While we hardly ask about how someone is born, the news of someone’s death is almost always followed by the question of How. Apart from satiating our curiosity and mellow down the shock of the news, there is a sense of relief we try to find in the answers. And to be honest, such news is not always unpleasant especially when the death is caused due to some natural causes; in unnatural or unforeseen circumstances however, the string of questions extends to when, where, and most importantly, Why, but that too remains valid for a short time and exists at a superficial level because when all said and done, everything merges into nothingness. The world in which we are living today, there is no dearth of such unnatural deaths and every day we get to know of several contemptible crimes, some of which are self-evident in their atrocity and some are veiled under the political nature of events which try to establish an unconvincing justification of taking several innocent lives. The convenience of language comes handy in allocating various terms to such events but at the end of the day and deep in our hearts we know what it should be called: 'Yes, a murder, nothing more'.

Javier Marías latest novel, The Infatuations (Los enamoramientos) in a brilliant translation by Margaret Jull Costa, is a philosophical enquiry into human nature, which when exposed to dark alleys of death and its companions, makes way into myriad speculations and unexpected conclusions. Maria, our protagonist, is in a habit of starting her day by having breakfast at a particular café in Madrid, where she silently observes a loving couple, Luisa and Miguel, whom she secretly attributes as ‘The Perfect Couple’. She feels happy on seeing them happy, inwardly smiles when they laugh at some random jokes and admire their immaculate sense of dressing style and their dignified demeanor. Watching them becomes a part of her daily routine and provides the necessary stimulant to deal with her otherwise mundane and at times frustrating day at work with a publishing house. Even without the exchange of a single word she feels a deep connection with them, a connection to which it won’t be wrong to give the name of 'The Infatuation'.

How fragile they are, these connections with people one knows only by sight.

Maria experiences the fragility of her abstract relationship with the couple when her routine was interrupted by their absence for several days. Miguel is brutally murdered and Luisa becomes an ‘inconsolable widow’. Should Maria go forward and offer some comforting words to the lady she was always in the habit of seeing besides a handsome man or better she let go of her curiosity surrounding the tragedy and move on with her life thus bringing an end to the Happy beginning to her mornings? Curiosity killed the cat but thankfully Maria is a ‘Prudent Young Woman’, the name given to her by the couple.

She does meet Luisa which makes way for some new characters and unfolds several layers concerning Miguel’s death which renders the whole situation a murder mystery. But this is not your everyday whodunit novel. This book screams of Marias style from every angle which, besides from great writing, offers huge chunks of internal monologues, philosophical discourses and microscopic analysis of different situations which further gives us enough material to contemplate, both while reading the book and after the last page is turned over. At times it reads like as if Marias pens down all the thoughts which occur in his mind relating to a quote he liked in a book or a news item he read in a national daily or observations he made while noticing a couple walking down a street or having a quiet dinner at some restaurant and with the rough draft in his hands, he inserts few characters and a subtle plotline in congruence to his thoughts and presents us with a unique literary achievement.

Maria, through her meeting with Luisa, meets Javier and falls in love with him or is it just an infatuation? Could be anything but it does make Luisa vulnerable since she becomes acquainted to some incomplete facts by way of sheer chance and holds the power in molding those facts into whatever concrete evidence she deems fit giving the situation she finds herself in and at the same time is exposed to life threatening conditions. It in turn tells us that one can easily find oneself carefully dissecting the delicate nature of truth in the face of uncertainty and how in the wake of making choice between making or breaking a life, (especially of those we have become infatuated with, whether in a trivial or substantial way) the questions of morality and ethics, takes a backseat.

..the most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that’s even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that.

Throughout the novel, we mostly find ourselves reading the numerous ruminations by Maria on subjects like love, death, justice, chance, destiny, psychology of guilt, the implications of thoughtful and thoughtless actions, truth, et al. Sounds boring? Yes, but there is something about Marías prose which gradually draws the reader in, captures the attention and the only way out in a satisfactory manner is to read till the end. As one character points out:

Again he had been tempted into speechifying, and was forcing himself to resist. He was trying to get to the point, and my feeling was that, if he was still taking his time, he was not doing so unwillingly and unwittingly, but had an end in mind, perhaps he was trying to draw me in and gradually accustom me to the facts.

The Infatuations, notwithstanding Marías merit as a writer, does have its share of flaws, most apparent of which is its narration from the perspective of female, which as I came to know, was a first for Marías. It’s not being carried out with as much finesse as Marías is capable of and for most of the part he succumbs to the age old generalizations pertaining to women behavior, specifically in terms of dealing with their male counterparts. Although most of the time the gender specificity of the narration is not that prominent but when it comes under the spot light, the weak points are easily discernible. Apart from that, this book runs the risk of pushing the readers patience to its extreme since the most interesting part comes close to around 200 pages, so had this been my first Marías book, I’d be a bit underwhelmed but it was not and met most of my expectations ensued after reading his other book, A Heart So White. Therefore, for Marías neophytes, it’s advisable to get acquainted with his style first but with some other book in order to understand the true essence of ‘The Infatuations’ in a more appreciative manner.

The emotional turmoil described in this book through various characters provides a profound and intellectual study of human fallibility, which when communicated through the impeccable observational skills of Marías that dwells nothing but on the brutal honesty, promises an inimitable reading experience. Four stars for this one. I really liked it.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

They sat here before. The Chambers. Awash in the overheated humidity, pomade, the dense artificial freshening scent. Moments before, an objection had been raised out there.

So, Sam, what...what can you give me?"

Gruesome over here objected to my objection.

You know he's right Ned. You can't object to an objection. If I were to allow that then one of you would object to that and the objections would go on until we could no more see them. I'm still not sure what your case is Sam. He rolled out his arms beneath the flowing robe, caring for the creases. He was on his, "Throne," behind the polished mahogany desk his chambers brightly lit.

Your Honor...Jimmy...Jim.

Your Honor will do.

My clients has...let's simplify it...incurred an injury.

Define the injury Sam better than you tried out there.

O.K. My client is a slow reader, call it cautious...

He looks like a slow reader.

Ned that's enough out of you. Act like a Prosecuting Attorney.

I am.

Act like a defense Attorney then. He looked at the clock on the desk. It could not be heard. No tick. Only numbers. No evidence time passed or moved. Less than thirty minutes gentleman before court is back in session and I expect we will come to a compromise before then. Sam, your defense, if we are going to call it such, is based on your client having suffered through the first one hundred and eighty pages of this novel. First Sam, the judge folded his hands and cast his famous thin grin, what kind of suffering? Was he flayed? Bodily scars to show the assault? It is a book Sammy. He could have put it down...

...Any time, Ned broke in. That is my point. He had the free will to stop reading the book at each moment. No one forced him. And by the way the tie doesn't go with the suit.

What does that have to do with anything?

He's wearing the tie, Jimmy...Your Honor, to have the jury see him as a shnook. He likes looking like a shnook so if he says something that makes sense it will sound smarter. Or make him look like he has a date after court he doesn't want to show for. Juries love this kind of stuff.

You think I'm wearing this tie because... I think you're bringing it up because you want to divert his Honor.

Boy. Boys. Children. Leave all this for when we get out there. Now, let's define the case each of you want to make and come up with a compromise. Shit, it's hot in here.

Take off the robe.

Go to hell. Sammy.

My client went through an emotional pain of three days, 180 pages, of reading something repetitive, suffocating and banal. He did not close it because he was led-on in a purposive manner.

Of course he was led. What the hell do you think these writers do. They plant things like terrorists. You can't even see them while you read. They lead you off in one direction then you find yourself somewhere else. Your honor this isn't a case. His client, this reviewer guy just doesn't have the chops.

Sam?

O.K. my client didn't start reading until later in life. But he has read a lot recently and has read many of this author's books. And, might I say loved them. And, for good reason. Now, I hate to agree with Ned-I wore this tie because I woke late and dressed in the dark-but you see the author led him on to continue reading this incredibly dull stuff by the richness of his previous novels, All Souls, TITBTOM...

TITBTOM, Sam?

Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me.

You see this is what he does, your Honor. He's shleps out in his mammy-pamsy suit and pathetic tie, he slightly musses up his hair, then the godawful dimple when he reluctantly smiles making him look like a kid who just needs this one break. And me, I look like the old cagey guy. Please tell him he can't use TITBTOM out there and then blush.

Get. To. The. Point.

Anyone having read the defendant's previous work would feel the compulsion to read on. The woman, the narrator, speculated about everything including her own speculations. Her thoughts never stopped or arrived anywhere...

Kind of like this conversation.

Very good your Honor. The story didn't go anywhere, never moved off the starting block. I hold out that my client as an average typical reader may have missed some salient points that in all honesty were too well hidden.

You mean Mr. Marias, Ned smiled, did too good of a job.

Took it too far. Besides he began with a fascinating hook where the narrator eats alone every morning in this diner watching this couple being happy, the perfect couple. There was a promise here your Honor that was broken for the next one hundred and eighty pages.

Damnit. What about Sam...

Ned sit down. We're just defining the cases. Take it easy.

Yes your Honor but what about this guy's attempt to be inside of a woman?

I must have missed that part Ned, Sam blushed What page did you say that was on?

The judge rose, played futilely with the thermostat then opened up a drawer with a key in a wood filing case. He brought the three quarter full bottle of aged scotch malt and three semi-clean glasses to the table and poured careful. They each raised their glasses and silently toasted one another.

You know what I mean. This is good scotch your Honor. Sammy boy purposively wants to embarrass himself even here as a strategy. We all know that I meant this writer is taking the chance to place himself inside of a woman's mind, her imagination. No credit for the courage of this. How hard it might be. Let's face it we guys are born into this world are taught that all kinds of things are coming to us. Power in large and small events. We expect it. Walk around with the expectation. Imagine what is like for a woman? Just for a moment? A woman alone? What she is handed before she can even speak in complete sentences is that she is not as good, not as capable, cannot fully depend on herself so must be with others. She, my friends, grows up in,
let's be honest, what is still a man's world, with a certain level of fear, vulnerability and in danger. She is taught and shown by our culture, by Sammy's jokes, that she is not set out on a level playing field. Ned held his hands up, O.K. so he didn't do a perfect job with this. I admit it. Who has? There was that yellow raft boat and somebodies choice.

Sophie's Choice.

Thanks Your Honor. I didn't know you read?

I...don't...not usually. From another case... He refilled the glasses in a ritual cadence. Arching their eyebrows they toasted again.

You have to, Ned went on, give the man credit for taking the chance. For trying. Do you realize that just the effort can have a great effect. One man reader to another, then another. If any of us, if I could through the effort, see the world through a woman's eyes, feel what its like being in this still-man's world, that has done the world a service. And Sam, Sammy, this is part of the book. Over and over again he shows this networking. How everything said and done effects and changes others forever, it all ripples out. It's like that painting. What the hell is that, he snapped his fingers but there was no sound. The judge and Sam tried not to look at the gnarling fingers. It's by that Jackson... guy. A bunch of stupid dots when you see it up close, if you want to even call them dots. Big deal right? You leave, then stop when you're at a distance and they are somehow all connected, into a whole. It is beautiful.

You might want to pour him some more, Sam jerked his head, your Honor.

The judge filled the cup, Now slow down this stuff is expensive.

Expensive. You've had it open for months now.

You don't expect the good stuff do you? You're trying to throw me off aren't you. Judges know how its done.

What, Ned lifted his glass, would a woman feel right now sitting here? Could she feel comfortable like we do, to be herself?

Speak for yourself. When Jimmy takes off the robe I'll feel a lot better. So will he. It must be eighty degrees in here. Okay Ned, he made an effort. I agree. Just not a good enough one. Sam tapped the table with the point of his index finger, it doesn't matter in the end my guy isn't going to create any ripples. He has no networkings to connect, no dots.

Is he any good?

No. I mean he's okay. Sam shrugged. He tries to be cutesy sometimes. Like this review. He has us speculating and being as banal as I'm complaining about. He's writing down everything we say. That kind of thing.

If this is his review I guess Marias doesn't have much to worry about.

No it's an on-line thing. A great site but he's one out of a few million. Someone here or there gives him a pat on the back. I don't think he's ever gotten twenty of them The guy doesn't even show a picture of himself so no one firebombs his house or sues him. Yeah, Sam laughs. The judge looks at the digital numbers lapse of time, its passing un-shown. Believe me whether he gives this a one star rating or a five no one cares. It's not going to get in the papers or stop anyone from reading it. It's going to be a three or four anyway.

I've never been inside of a review before. Are we allowed to break and use the bathroom?

Gentlemen, the judge tapped at his wrist where a watch should have been, the idea of this recess, if I may remind you, was to let me know what case each of you are establishing then see what compromise we want to reach. He picked a pen from a holder and pointed its blunt end at Sam. Your point is that your client, this Mr. S., suffered some sort of emotional injury because for the first what, one hundred and eighty pages, he was misled by the author's past reputation and his, the readers, expectations were thwarted over a lengthy period of time...

I would your honor...

Do you need more scotch?

Sam nodded his head. My client was significantly disappointed. As the prosecuting attorney pointed out Marias himself showed in the narrative how one person being effected by an event will then network out to others, effect others who will then effect more. This disappointment will not only injure my client, stay with him forever but will spread. It cannot be seen...

It can, can't it? On his face? Movements? How he treats other people?

Are you taking his side your honor. Teaming up? You owe him?

Me? The judge held his hands up, speak to the shmuck writing our review.

Then I object. It is all a conflict of interest.

There you go with your objections again. That's how we got here in the first place. Of course it's a conflict of interest. That's the problem about being in a review. He's the guy tapping on a keyboard. Can't you see the words coming out of my mouth? We just have to do the best we can. Be a man about it.

You see...

See what? Never mind.

So, Sam interrupted, glancing at the ceiling, the corners first, the writing was flat, boring, didn't meet the expectations from previous works, and failed to fulfill the setup of the scene and narrator's character from the beginning. Hopes dashed. The reader, my client, being in my estimation unfairly prosecuted, he glanced back up at the ceiling corner, is left in danger of fearing being disappointed in trying any novel now, in life. And yes I respect his attempt to place us males inside the mind of a woman, to see the world through her eyes. Every man should want to do this as difficult and resistive as it may be. A requirement to be licensed as a human being. However, the author held out a gold ring. We finally got there. And we really did. He put the narrator in a physically and emotionally tense and frightening situation. Around page one eighty the writing became immediate. The narrator became palpably vulnerable. Breathtaking. My client could now look back at the narrator's endless discourse and speculation, the attempts to set up all the possibilities in a mystery novel that wasn't happening, the banality and dreary internal banter... your Honor, you're sweating by the way...and he was able to see the inner experience of this woman's isolation, fear and vulnerability. It could just as effectively have been done, according to my client, within approximately one-third the number of pages. Easy for my client to say. But here we are. We have reached the great writing, the suspense of the story unfolding, experiencing the narrator's experiences first-hand. It is a revelation. Almost worth the drudgery through the one hundred and eighty pages. Then, further along it slips back into its former style to the point where the unfolding was no longer pertinent to my client. He was baited. Exhausted. All the interiority. Marias out-Mariased himself. Simple as that then all he was left with was true, beautific language but otherwise scarred and empty handed. Unfair, and may I say unnecessary.

Listen Jimmy...I mean your Honor...Sam over here can say whatever he wants but he ain't too well read...

Is that so?

Yes your honor. He missed the entire point if I got it right. You know how some people read and they say they see more than what's before them. Right? We deal in a different world. We deal in the real world, objects, people witnessing concrete actions. I spoke to a couple of professors at our college up here. Man, this guy writing this thing doesn't even trust I'm smart enough to come up with this on my own. I've got to get it from some Professors.

He's right Ned.

Oh yeah. Let's see what he does to you.

Holding up his partially robed arm once more, looking at the static numbered clock, the judge said, we've got seven minutes gentlemen before recess is over.

The book by the end that my esteemed colleague and his beleaguered client missed is that...give me a second and let me check my notes...is a wonderfully successful text about fiction...storytelling itself. Everything is a fictitious story putting everything said and done in doubt. You know, that long explanation of Diaz Valera's to Maria? Who knows what to believe of that. As the writer so skillfully shows and, get it Sam, you too, Diaz Valera has all the power telling it. It isn't so simple. He'll tell what he remembers, how he remembers it, what is left in and out, how it benefits him in remembering himself-which may be custom manufactured by shards of these memories. It is his, the storyteller's reality. Then Maria will do with it what she needs to do and that will be her reality which may be passed on to others. Remember all of this will effect and network others. But, what he is saying and the book is about is that everything is in doubt. Everything in the book, everything we have said here is in doubt. We make believe that it isn't.

If you don't mind, and let me say this slowly so we all understand, we will make believe for the next couple of minutes that we have no doubts. Everything before us is real, concrete and identifiable. The case you are going to present Ned is; the author was doing his job from the beginning and the defendant's complaints shows he was doing his job only too well, the courageous attempt at having the reader experience a woman's isolation, fear, vulnerability, and that the essence of the book, the very way the book was written and would be read is that everything is a story, all stories are manufactured by the teller, and let's see, according to their needs, and thus everything, including what the reader just read or is reading is in doubt. Did I get that all Ned? Please feel free to nod your head yes.

Just one thing your Honor.

The judge rose, stoppered the bottle of scotch. Placing it back in the drawer of the wood file cabinet, he locked it. Returning, he sat pleating his robe in place, then stretching his arms. Thirty seconds Ned.

He read Virginia Woolf's, The Waves, before this. One of the professor's says here in my notes...that it is a book that when read will reconfigure the person in their relationship with their world and with themselves. There is no way that he could then read, The Infatuations, and remain unchanged and be able to objectify the experience of this text.

Was that last part yours Ned?

Its in my notes...

He didn't write it your honor.

Uh. It doesn't make any difference. And your's Sam is that the book was unreadable at the beginning. Then the writer baited you with false hope and dropped you again. Although you have no physical injury you are claiming an emotional injury of significant disappointment. You claim that all aside , your clients review will be read by a small group of on-line readers who are kind, intelligent, and generally overlook any gaffes or overstatements your client generally makes. There will be no ripple effect in the...world whether he gives this book a rating of...let's see...three or four stars.

Yes, your Honor.

This will be our compromise that we have settled on, that will be agreed upon and announced out there by yours truly. You Ned, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney, will drop all charges if the defendant reviews this book with a three and a half star rating. You okay with that Sam?

Um. I believe there is no three and a half stars. I've seen this sight. No halves. Decimals and fractions are out. It is precisely either a three or four. I propose a three.

Your Honor...

Yes...Ned. Is there something more you wan to say?

Anything below a four and the defendant will have to cop to at least a lesser degree of defamation of character.

Ned...next time I'll give you the good scotch?

No sir.

Sir?

Sir.

Then Sam?

Why not. My guy probably missed some things anyway. A four it is.

Then gentlemen, I am glad to announce we are done, with ten seconds to spare,

Your honor...?

Yes...Ned?

Can we just get up and leave? I mean, will the guy writing the review let us.

Well Ned, let's stand up, open the door and see.

[Heba]

تبدو الفكرة القائمة عليها الرواية عادية جداً بل تكاد تكون مُكررة ، لكن عليّ الاعتراف بعبقرية الكاتب في قدرته على إلتفاف الفكرة حول نفسها دونما تعقيد في توصيف أشد الطبائع البشرية ارباكاً ...إنها طبائعنا العصية على فك لغزها....
النوازع الفردية الخبيثة رغم انها مبعثرة متناثرة إلا انها تكاد تتفق جميعها في اتخاذ الاجراءات ذاتها لبلوغ غاياتها...كم من الجرائم مخفية غير معلنة تفلت من العقوبة ...تقترف جرائم بشعة ليست بالضرورة ان تقتصر على القتل بل قد تكون الخداع والخيانة ، كل ذلك بطمأنينة مُنفرة بغيضة ويتناسى صاحبها انه من اطلق صفارة البدء..
هل اخبرتكم أن الضمير الانساني لا يموت بل يظل يوخز صاحبه الذي يتجاهله متعمداً...!!
هنا تقف مذهولاً امام قدرة المرء على تقديم كل المسوغات لتبرير افعاله الدنيئة...واختلاق الأعذار الواهية في سبيل تحقيق رغباته حتى وإن كان ذلك يستدعي نزع كل ما يحول دون ذلك وازاحته عن طريقه ...
هنا جريمة قتل بدم بارد تتستر وراء دافع الغرام، ولكن في الحقيقة إن النوازع الخبيثة تتكرر على مدى تاريخ البشرية ، فما كان الدافع سوى أنانية طاغية لاثبات الذات وانه لا شيء يُستعصى عليها نيله وتملكه...
واخيراً ..هل حقاً نحن الأحياء من نمنح الموتى قوتهم ؟
واذا ما عادوا ، هل سيجدون اماكنهم شاغرة بانتظارهم ام تراهم قد يُشكلون ثقلاً على أحبتهم بعد تعافيهم وبعد ما احتل آخرون أماكنهم ؟....
هل نحن قادرون على نفض الموتى عنا ؟
من منا لا يستطيع التعافي ولكن تبقى ذكراهم كما لو كانت تمائم صغيرة منقوشة على جدران القلب لا سبيل لمحوها...، قد تتضاءل الذكرى وتبهت ولكنها لا تختفي أو تتلاشى ابداً...
هذا باستثناء فقد الوالدين ، تبقى أماكنهم لا يمكن لأحد ابداً أن يشغلها ، تبقى دوماً لك ملاذاً لتنذوي الى ما كان يوماً ولم يعُد موجوداً......

[Rojita · Rating 4 out of 5]

خابیر ماریاس! چرا من تا حالا کشف‌ات نکرده بودم!
باید از خانم مهسا ملک مرزبان ممنون باشم که با ترجمه‌ی این کتاب من رو به دنیای ماریاس و شیفتگی‌ها برد، یک دنیایِ عجیبِ جذاب!
یک ستاره رو کم کردم چون بعضی جاها توضیحاتِ اضافه‌ای می‌داد که خواننده رو گیج میکرد ، شاید هم مشکل از منه که آدم توضیح‌پذیری نیستم😁.
اما در حالت کلی شخصیت‌پردازی‌ها خیلی خوب بود، انگار خابیر ماریاس دقیقن برای این خلق شده که با کمترین کلمات، شخصیتها و موقعیت‌ها رو به بهترین شکل تشریح کنه، حتی شخصیت‌هایی که حضور کمرنگی توی داستان داشتند. شخصیت‌ها سیاه و سفید نبودند و من به راحتی تونستم با شخصیت‌های اصلی همذات‌پنداری کنم.
این کتاب، داستانِ عشق و دلبستگی و وابستگی و جنایات آدم‌ها در حق همدیگه بود اما نه آن عشق‌های خامِ کودکانه و نه آن جنایت‌هایی که الزامن با خونریزی و درد ظاهری همراه هستن و شاید همیشه در سکوت باقی می‌مونن.
این کتاب رو با بُغضی به پهنای صورتم و عمقِ قلبم تموم کردم و در آخر کتاب نوشتم:
" شاید اگر مطمئن بودم بعد از مرگ دنیایی وجود ندارد، با اشتیاقِ بیشتری به مُردن فکر میکردم. خسته‌تر از آنم که بخواهم دوباره زندگی کنم"

[Mohammad Hrabal · Rating 3 out of 5]

تاکنون رمانی که در آن نویسنده تا این حد روده‌درازی کرده باشد ندیده‌ام. هم راوی و هم کاراکترهای کتاب به‌شدت پرگو و روده‌دراز هستند. برای خواندن این کتاب باید بسیار حوصله و صبر داشته باشید.
به قول خود نویسنده: «در بحث و تفسیر و انحراف از موضوع، استعداد آشکاری داشت. متوجه شده‌ام این استعداد بسیاری از نویسندگانی است که در دفتر انتشارات با آن‌ها آشنا شده‌ام. انگار سیاه کردن صفحات متعدد با افکار و داستان‌ها که جز در برخی موارد، پوچ، خودنمایانه، نفرت‌انگیز یا اسف‌بار هستند برایشان کافی نیست.» صفحه ۱۳۴ کتاب
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بعضی‌ها حتی بی منظور ما را می‌خندانند. مهم‌ترین دلیل�� آن است که حضور لذت‌بخشی دارند. بنابراین، به‌سادگی از دیدنشان و بودن در کنارشان به وجد می‌آییم. کافی است سراپا گوش شویم. حتی اگر حرف جالبی نزنند یا چرند بگویند بازهم به نظرمان جالب است. صفحه ۱۵ کتاب
عجیب است که عادت‌های ما این‌قدر در مقابل تغییر مقاومت می‌کنند. حتی وقتی آن تغییرات برای بهتر شدن باشند. صفحه ۲۵ کتاب
ما با هزاران معمای حل نشده‌ای زندگی می‌کنیم که صبح، ده دقیقه ذهنمان را اشغال می‌کند و بعد فراموش مان می‌شود، بی رعشه اندوهی بر جان، بی‌هیچ نشانه‌ای. صفحه‌ای ۴۱ کتاب
گاه اتفاقاتی می‌افته که نمی‌شه هیچکس رو به‌خاطرش مقصر دونست. یا چیزی به اسم بدشانسی وجود داره یا گاهی آدم‌ها از مسیر شون خارج میشن، راهشون رو گم می‌کنن و برای خودشون بدبختی و ادبار به بار میارن. صفحه ۶۴ کتاب
در همون زمان و توی این جهان نامطمئن تنها نمی‌موندیم، جهانی که توی اون هر چیز آشنایی ازمون سلب می‌شه. اگه این‌جا نباشیم هیچ چیزی رو نمی‌تونن ازمون بگیرن. اگه خودمون مرده باشیم دیگه چیزی برامون نمی‌میره. صفحه ۸۹ کتاب
این‌که چه اتفاقی افتاد اصلا مهم نیست. این یک رمانه و موقعی که تموم می‌شه اتفاقات هم اهمیتشون رو از دست می‌دن و راحت فراموش میشن. مهم امکان‌ها و ایده‌هاییه که پیرنگ خیالی رمان با ما به اشتراک می‌ذاره و اون رو به ما القا می‌کنه. پیرنگی که اون رو به‌مراتب واضح‌تر از حوادث واقعی بیاد میاریم و بهش بیشتر اهمیت می‌دیم. (این مطلب با همین کلمات و کمی تغییر باز در صفحه ۲۲۶ کتاب تکرار شده‌است.) صفحه ۱۳۵ کتاب
اگر کسی نخواهد حرفی به گوش ما برسد، همه کار می‌کنیم که از آن سر در بیاوریم، نمی‌فهمیم گاهی آدم‌ها چیزهایی را به خاطر خودمان از ما مخفی می‌کنند تا مأیوس نشویم یا فکرمان درگیر نشود. صفحه ۱۵۸ کتاب
بعد از قرن‌ها تمرین، بعد از این‌همه پیشرفت و اختراعات شگفت‌انگیز، هنوز راهی وجود ندارد که بفهمیم آدم‌ها کی حرف راست می‌زنند. طبیعتاً این برای همه ما منافع و مضرات یکسانی دارد و شاید تنها سنگر بازمانده از آزادی باشد. صفحه ۲۴۴ کتاب
هیچکس نمی‌تونه اعتراض کنه که چرا به دنیا اومده یا چرا قبلاً به دنیا اومده یا چرا همیشه زنده نمی‌مونه. بنابراین چرا آدم باید به مردن یا نبودن توی دنیا یا تا ابد نموندن توی دنیا اعتراضی بکنه؟ به نظرش هر دوی این نقطه نظرها احمقانه بود. ما اعتراضی به تاریخ تولدمون نداریم پس چرا باید به تاریخ مرگ مون اعتراض کنیم که کاملاً شانسیه. حتی مرگ‌های ناجور، حتی خودکشی هم به شانس ربط داره. و چون همه ما زمانی ساکنان خلا بودیم یا وضعیت عدم وجود رو تجربه کردیم، چه چیزی بازگشت به اون موقعیت رو این‌قدر عجیب و وحشتناک می‌کنه؟ صفحه ۲۸۲ کتاب
وقتی نمی‌دانی چه چیزی را باور کنی، وقتی بلد نیستی نقش کارآگاه آماتور را بازی کنی خسته می‌شوی و کل ماجرا را وا می‌دهی، رهایش می‌کنی، دست از فکر کردن برمی‌داری و می‌خواهی حقیقت کل این توده درهم فرورفته‌ را که همه به یک جا ختم می‌شود کشف کنی. واقعیت هیچ‌وقت معلوم نمی‌شود. همیشه یک توده گوریده باقی می‌ماند. حتی وقتی به تهش می‌رسی. اما در زندگی واقعی نیازی به یافتن حقیقت یا فدا کردن خود برای کشف آن نیست. این اتفاق‌ها فقط مال رمان‌های بچگانه‌ است. صفحه ۳۱۴ کتاب

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

God, I love reading. A good novel one of the greatest pleasures that we get in this life, and fuck you everyone who helped me forget that, and God bless you Javier Marías for making me remember.

Okay, so I just invoked the Lord's name twice in one small paragraph, which must mean I'm a bit worked up. I don't know if I can convey how much I enjoyed this book, but beyond that, what a profound relief it was for me to enjoy it so much, now.

I'm coming up on the closing end of an MFA program. While in sum this has been great for me and I feel incredibly lucky to have been allowed all this time off from real life to read and write, in certain ways I feel that the experience damaged my relationship with the written word. It's made me cynical about writing, for one thing, and has compromised my ability to lose myself in books. This doubtless has a lot more to do with my personal pathology than with any flaw in the MFA system, but the discourse and assumptions of MFA-land (broadly speaking) have disrupted my historical enthusiasm for literature. To be fair -- and to emphasize that this is much more about my own eccentricities than anything else -- I did once go from being an obsessive bookworm-from-age-five to a near-illiterate due to high school English classes, which made me hate books, and I didn't read novels for almost two years after college because having been made to discuss and analyze it had temporarily ruined the thrill of fiction for me.

Fortunately, I don't think I'll suffer such long-term effects this time, thanks to the heroism of the brilliant Spaniard Javier Marías!

I have a hard time articulating what I find so mortally offensive about my interpretation of the MFA dogma, but I think it might be the idea that everyone has something worth writing about, and that we just all need to learn certain skills in order to do it well. In fact, in my opinion, most people do not have anything worth writing about, or at least, do not have anything to write that I'd ever want to read. And that's simply because most of us humans do not have particularly interesting or original minds. I feel like a lot of the MFA world would object that this doesn't matter -- a lot of people have interesting stories, they might say, and thus the great need for all these billions of memoirs (and my response to this would be to vomit on their feet).

But yeah, I feel like the implication I picked up from MFA-land is that it doesn't matter if you don't have a uniquely fascinating mind; once you learn the tricks and techniques, you can manufacture some fiction and serve it up to people who will recognize the product as palatable and therefore consume it. I feel like that's what workshops are: sort of a quality control taste test, like what Applebee's probably has to make sure their newly developed recipes all taste like something they'd serve.

The analogy for me is cooking. The MFA is a cooking school that teaches eager students all kinds of techniques, from simple braising to complex foams, so that they can concoct all manner of restaurant-ready cuisines. The thing, though, for me, is that even with all these skills and bells and whistles, if you're using mediocre ingredients, how awesome can the dish you make ultimately be?

What matters isn't so much how you cook as what you're cooking with. In fiction, the ingredients are the author's brain, and if the author's brain isn't particularly juicy and tasty to begin with, you might wind up with a decent soup but the end product can only be but so great. Conversely, a brilliant writer can burn the hell out of something and write a shitty book; that happens all the time. But ideally, the chef's skills and technique will perfectly exploit and highlight the advantages of his raw materials, which is what Marías accomplishes beautifully in The Infatuations.

The first sentence of this book scalded away the sour aftertaste of my MFA-acquired nitpicky hypercritical reading habit, and reminded me of what it's like to read for pure pleasure. Marías's prose makes me feel like I'm a dog having my belly scratched, a bizarre thing to announce since I'm reading him in translation, which is like, I don't even know what it's like, falling in love with someone who's had a ton of drastic plastic surgery procedures done, like on those shows they had on TV a lot a decade ago where people got everything on their body redone at once, so that you don't actually know what they look like? Wait, I guess it's not like that at all. Never mind, jeez, I don't know... But if living in Miami for three years isn't enough motivation to learn Spanish (which evidently it hasn't been), wanting to read Marías properly should be. I feel like he writes very much with translation in mind, but I also get confused by the parts where he explicitly discusses the language because I don't know what the Spanish would be and what the translator had to tweak.

Anyway, my confused non-point about the author's brain and all that is just that Marías's mind is so compelling and fascinating that it makes me feel, as a lazy back-cover blurber might write, spellbound. I mean, I just feel like his mind literally casts a spell with his words and I don't care what happens in the book, as long as I can stay in it. Actually, this book did have a suspenseful plot and I did want to know what would happen next, but that pleasure was very much secondary to just wanting to keep on reading his sentences, inhabiting this consciousness he created, seeing the world from this perspective. I know people would disagree with me, but that power of seduction and hypnosis can't be taught in any school. And I may be wrong about this too, but I doubt anyone has ever inspired true love, or even profound infatuation, by relying on a copy of The Game or The Rules, which I imagine to be cooking-school-slash-MFA-in-book-form (forgive my mixed metaphors [or actually fuck it, don't, this ain't a workshop, if you don't like it too bad!]) for would-be seducers. Using these guides, you might get someone to sleep with you a few times, or who knows, even propose, but to make someone fall deeply in love with you, you need to have something in you capable of seriously inflaming another's passion. An organic tomato, as it were, or just a vision of the earth that's unlike any ordinary person's, but is enough like ours so that we can get lost in your work.

Anyway, I'm not going to say this book is for everyone, cause I bet it's not, but it's definitely for me. If you love long, recursive sentences and slow, largely internal, meditative fiction with a theoretically lurid, thriller-type plot but have not yet checked this guy out, do.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

A Gender of Her Own

Marias' first person narrator is a woman, Maria (with neither his accent, his "s" nor his balls).

It's tempting to read this novel, preoccupied by the search for evidence that this is a foolish narrative device (e.g., the fear that we might find sentences like "a gust of cold air made my nipples hard," which, rest assured, doesn't appear within!). However, such a quest would really only deprive the reader of the pleasure of the text.

It's true that the novel reads very much like Marias' other novels, all of which are narrated by males.

However, the resemblance results more from the consistency of Marias' preoccupations and use of language.

You could argue that no two Beatles' songs sound alike, apart perhaps from the vocals. However, Marias has more in common with the first five I.R.S. albums by R.E.M., which crafted a highly consistent and identifiable sound. You could always tell an R.E.M. song, before Michael Stipe opened his mouth.

A Sentimental Attachment

It helps that Marias places Maria in a publishing house. She doesn't just read books, she edits and promotes them. More importantly, she doesn't just edit contemporary literature professionally, she reads it for pleasure. Thus, it makes sense that Maria shares Marias' sensitivity and attention to detail:

"I knew that the publishing house was, for me, a place tinged with sentiment, which is impossible to conceal or avoid, even if the sentiment is only half-imagined."

If we don't find the narrator's gender convincing in the first half, then by the second half, it's arguably less of a concern. The difference is that, in the first half, Maria focuses on other people. In the second half, her own relationships move to the forefront.

A Woman's Observation

What Marias' narrators of both genders share are remarkable powers of observation, not just of the external environment, but also of body language, conversational nuance, sentiment, emotion, motive, causation and effect.

The advantage that a female narrator gives Marias is the ability to judge men (and women) from a female point of view.

In this case, the difference lies in the mark each sex wishes to make on the world.

However, to some extent, Maria can also judge Marias, or at least the device allows Marias to purport to judge himself from the perspective of a woman.

A Life in Sentences

I've read a lot of sentences since joining GR, as well as a lot about sentences. I've come to belatedly admire Proust. However, of the authors I like who are still living today, I'm almost ready to say that Marias is the most impressive (some credit should probably go to his English translator, Margaret Jull Costa).

Each sentence contributes to the narrative flow of the overall drama. However, many individual sentences (some of which extend imperceptibly for pages) contain their own mini-drama, as if the sentence in its modest entirety contained the whole of a discrete narrative. If the novel is a universe, then one of these sentences is a galaxy.

Marias makes a unique and consummate stylist like William H. Gass look arid, angry and academic. With Marias, you get a sense of an intellectual and emotional life lived (and not just observed) to the fullest.

The Theatrical Gaze

Maria is frequently gazed at. Equally, she gazes at others, both women and men.

Still, the events that she recounts concern people who seem larger than life, if only because of the level of drama that surrounds them, or rather with which they have surrounded themselves:

"I had a good view of them both, in profile, as if I were in the stalls and they were on stage, except that we were on the same level...I didn't want to be disturbed. I didn't want to take my eyes off that stage-like table..."

There is more than one infatuation in the novel. The title is, after all, plural. One of the two on stage is infatuated with the other, and Maria is infatuated with them (singular).

So much happens in the mind, so much is thought, yet for me the novel has all of the dramatic tension of theatre.

Between Stage and Stalls

There is a murder at the heart of the novel (committed early on). Maria gets entangled in the aftermath. As she says, she is an editor, not a detective. However, she gets close enough to the events to examine, witness and appraise the unfolding of the story, indeed to narrate it.

She also breaks down the distance, the barrier between stage and stalls. From this proximity, she learns what good actors people can be. She learns about the art of deception.

Equally, we readers learn that the illusion of theatre and fiction gives us the ability to think and act like a murderer. It allows us to humanise, personalise and contextualise crime, without necessarily judging it or the perpetrators, so that it's not totally absurd to say, "Yes, a murder, nothing more."

The Return of the Dead

This line comes from Dumas' "The Three Musketeers". Marias also alludes frequently to "Macbeth" and Balzac's novella, "Colonel Chabert".

What Marias makes of these allusions is a tale about death, time, the timing of death, and the manner of its happening.

None of us can know the timing of our own death. If we suffer an accident or are murdered (like Lady Macbeth - "The queen, my Lord, is dead"), another factor intervenes, when we "should have died hereafter".

But we all have to die, and ironically the timing and manner of our death is of less concern to us (for we had to die sooner or later, and now we are dead), than it is to those around us.

It's others who suffer grief, and wish for a time that they could bring us back. Alternatively, they might wish to avoid grief altogether:

"She should have died later on, when I wasn't alive to hear the news, or to see or to dream anything; when I was no longer in time and incapable, therefore, of understanding."

The Erasure of the Past

On the other hand, the lesson to be drawn from Balzac's novella is that, if we are dead or believed to be dead, it is better for all concerned that we not return ("it is a mistake for the dead to return").

Time, having passed, should not be rewound. If we vanish, we should vanish for good, if not necessarily, for better. It is the function of the present to forget, to minimise, to erase the past. The present should let it be:

"...with the passing of time, what has been should continue to have been, to exist only in the past, as is always or almost always the case, that is how life is intended to be, so there is no undoing what is done and no unhappening what has happened; the dead must stay where they are and nothing can be corrected."

Or to put it another way:

"Fortunately or unfortunately, the dead are as fixed as paintings, they don't move, they don't add anything, they don't speak and never respond. And they are wrong to come back, those who can."

The Stain of Memory and Guilt

This might be sage advice. However, our memories work against it. They preserve in us fragments, remnants, vestiges, ghosts of the past:

"Anything anyone tells you becomes absorbed in your consciousness, even if you don't believe it or know that it never happened and that it's pure invention, like novels and films, like the remote story of Colonel Chabert."

Of course, if we are the perpetrator of a crime, the poison that drove us (e.g., envy, covetousness, greed), the poison we have used, might remain as a permanent, ineradicable, damned spot or blot or stain or mark on our conscience as well.

Yes, a Murder, Nothing More

In deciding whether to commit the crime, we have to weigh up the burden of the stain:

"What would be the point of having impregnated myself like this, with this murder, this conspiracy, this horror, of carrying the deceit and the betrayal within my breast for ever, of never being able to shake them off or forget them except in moments of unconsciousness...what would be the point of having established a link that will reappear in my dreams and that I will never be able to break, what would be the point of all this vileness, if I fail to reach my one goal?"

Unfortunately, in the case of murder (even if it be nothing more), the crime is irreversible. We cannot wake the dead (as Macbeth says, "I would thou couldst"). Thus, we might be left with the collective burdens of memory, guilt and punishment.

Crime and Punishment

As Maria acquires knowledge and understanding, she must determine what to do with it.

This is perhaps where Marias speculates that women, or at least Maria, might be different from men:

"It doesn't matter that some, if not most, civilian [criminal] acts go unrecorded, ignored, as is the norm. Men, however, tend to strive to achieve quite the opposite effect, although they often fail: to leave branded on the skin a fleur-de-lys that perpetuates and accuses and condemns, and possibly unleashes more crimes. That would probably have been my intention with anyone else, or with him too, had I not fallen stupidly and silently in love, and if I did not still love him a little."

Marias doesn't expressly say it, but women might have a greater capacity for grace and forgiveness, while men tend to bear grudges, not to mention being more prepared to remove obstacles in the way of getting what they want (even if the manner of removal might be criminal).

Between Two Chance Events

Life consists of two chance events: our birth and our death. We are not usually responsible for the timing of either. Equally, we meet people (one chance event), fall in love or become infatuated ("el enamoramiento"), fall out of love, part company and recover (the second chance event).

Maria faces this reality with almost superhuman equanimity:

"In the end, everything tends toward attenuation, sometimes little by little and thanks to great effort on our part; sometimes with unexpected speed and contrary to our will, while we struggle in vain to keep faces from fading and paling into nothing, and deeds and words from becoming blurred objects that drift about in our memory with the same scant value as those we've read about in novels or seen and heard in films..."

Love, like time, passes. As Maria says, "It will pass, it already is passing, that's why I don't mind acknowledging it."

In a way, she acknowledges that it's up to us to determine how much or how little we fit between two chance events.

Whether a woman or a man was responsible for it, it is nevertheless a timeless and beautifully composed acknowledgement.





SOUNDTRACK:

Javier Marías - "The Infatuations"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZidw...

"It's probably the same thing, the same stories, the same drop of water falling on the same stone all the time, ever since Homer or before..."

Ella Fitzgerald "Someone to Watch Over Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYQBB...

Amy Winehouse - "Someone to Watch over Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLqsI...

John Cale - "I Keep A Close Watch"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZzzi...

John Cale - "I Keep A Close Watch"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM1t7...

John Cale - "Guts"

Chris Spedding on guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9UAh...

"The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife
Did it quick and split
Back home, fresh as a daisy
To Maisy, oh Maisy.

And the twelve-bore it stood in the corner
Quite operatic in its self disgust
It blew him all over the living room floor
Like parrot shit, parrot spit, parrot shit was shot.

Now suppose it was someone familiar
Someone we all would know
Embarrassing denouement, n'est-ce pas?
Familiar hyperbole.

And there would go the secret plot
The piss had missed the hole in the pot
Like that ancient teenage dream
From soul to poison, soul to poison, soul."

Live version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2do0q...

Soft Boys - "I Wanna Destroy You"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAt7h...

The Smiths - "The Queen is Dead"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tb8X...

"The queen, my Lord, is dead."

Lou Reed - "Vanishing Act"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS06h...

"How nice it is to disappear,
Float into a mist,
With a young lady on your arm
Looking for a kiss.

It might be nice to disappear
To have a vanishing act
To always be looking forward
Never look over your back

It must be nice to disappear
Float into a mist
With a young lady on your arm
Looking for a kiss."




Mayot Cafe and Foodstore

The last time I saw Joffrey was also the last time I went to the Mayot Cafe. I had never spoken to him. When he wasn't alone, he tended to be with one of two people. One I assumed must have been his wife, for he was never with any other woman, and unlike the other customers, he didn't flirt with the staff, at least in my presence. The other was possibly an old school friend or his attorney or his stock broker. The other man was always dressed in a suit. Earlier in the week, when the two of them had been there together, I had overheard the other man use phrases like "diversified portfolios", which along with everything else Joffrey attentively typed into his iPad. This last day, however, he was alone, though judging by the number of times he looked at his watch, he was expecting somebody else to arrive. When at last he read the messages on his phone, he ordered a cup of coffee, and took a book out of his bag. It seemed like his friend wasn't coming or that they would be delayed. If he had been a little less chubby, I might have found him attractive. Before I learned he might be married, when I had only seen him dining by himself, I even wondered whether I should initiate a conversation with him. But I didn't. Still, on this last day, when it would have been too late anyway, I loved the way his lips moved silently while he read his book. It made me want to go right over and kiss them. I nearly did. For a moment, it seemed as if we might leave at the same time, but he ordered another coffee. Just as it arrived and I was about to depart, he closed his book and set it very precisely on the table, then he leaned back and took a photo of it against the background of the plaza outside the cafe. He looked very pleased with himself. Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have patience for the long, drawn out, run-on sentences. This novel taxed my patience. It could have been a fairly good novel if it was reduced by two-thirds. That said, the story is narrated (somewhat) by a woman named Maria. I write “somewhat” because three-quarters of the novel is in her head, what she conjectures other characters thinking or what they might say. I got confused many times: did that person say that or did Maria envision them saying that? Maria notices a “Perfect Couple” every morning at her morning cafe. This couple is noticeably in love and enviable. What transpires is that the husband of the couple is horrendously murdered. Through happenstance, Maria gets information about why the murder was committed(it wasn't a random event). The novel then becomes a rumination of whether Maria should come forth and get involved. Are some murders justified? What is a murder? Would the wife be better off knowing the information Maria has? What good would her information serve? Is what she learns actually true? It’s 336 pages of digressions, discourse, conjuring, and arbitrary syntactic leaps. Interesting idea; it could have been told in a short story.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviours, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions usually considered to be of a private nature. [Hirschfeld]

The argument proposed here is that reading a book is an act of voyeurism, with us readers spying on the intimate lives of the characters. Javier Marias is one of the best writers to take this idea on and run through every implication and variation, adding some of his signature touches in the mix (pervasive morbidity and never-ending phrasing among others)

This is not a plot driven story, but it is a novel after all, and there are some rules to follow. You need some characters and a conflict of sorts as a starting point for your speculations about life, death and love. We begin with a young single woman, Maria Dolz, working as an editor at a prestigious Madrid publishing house. She takes her breakfast every morning at her favorite coffee house, and there she likes to speculate about the lives of a happy couple, very much in love, that she usually sees sitting across from her. Until one day the routine is broken.

You could say that I wished them all the best in the world, as if they were characters in a novel or a film for whom one is rooting right from the start, knowing that something bad is going to happen to them, that at some point, things will go horribly wrong, otherwise there would be no no novel or film.

Maria is paraphrasing the great Tolstoy here, or rather Javier Marias is playing with the reader like a cat with her toy mouse, embedding meta-fictional touches in the story, as he will do later with numerous references to a novella by Balzac: "Colonel Chabert". It's thrilling I guess to have a writer who let's you see the nuts and bolts of how he constructs his edifice, or, to make another analogy, to have a magician show you how he does his tricks. Marias uses here to great effect the contrast between the state of bliss before the event and the grief and longing after the thunder has struck.

Perhaps it was his wife who mainly made him laugh, for there are people who can make us laugh even when they don't intend to, largely because their very presence pleases us, and so it's easy enough to set us off, simply seeing them and being in their company and hearing them is all it takes, even if they're not saying anything very extraordinary or are even deliberately spouting nonsense, which we nevertheless find funny.

If you think I'm speaking in riddles, let me state the facts now : Miguel Desvern is killed one morning in a brutal knifing attack as he was going to work. The perpetrator apparently confused him with someone else. The widow, Luisa Alday, is inconsolable, her whole life torn apart in an act of senseless violence. She retracts into her shell, catatonic, neither her children, her husband's best friend, or even Maria once they get acquainted, managing to convince her that life does go on after such a tragedy.

How dreadful to have such a thing happen to you, I mean what happened to your favorite couple. To begin a day like any other with not the faintest idea that someone is going to take your life, and in the most brutal manner.

This is not my first novel by Marias, and I sort of knew what to expect, but I confess I struggled a bit with his focus on despair, death, loss. He goes on and on about the pain Louisa, and indirectly Maria, are going through. The payoff is in another of those meta-fictional touches the author slips in between the descriptive passages of spiritual agony, when he addresses us, the readers, directly:

We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don't want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people's misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: 'How dreadful. But what's next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we've worn out yesterday's already.'

As a side note, this quote is one of his shortest ones I've bookmarked, and incomplete to boot. After Faulkner, Marias is probably the best author to run a sentence over several pages with elegance, style, and most of all – a coherent vision. He can write shorter dialogues, when he is bothered to try, and they are as impactful:

"What's the point if we're all doomed anyway? It's all pointless. Whatever we do, we'll only be waiting, like dead men on leave, as someone once said."

Even his characters get enough of doom after awhile, and the focus of the novel shifts slightly on how to rebuild your life after the love has gone, or in the absence of a love so strong the poets would swoon about it for ages. Maria gets romantically involved with Diaz-Varela, the family friend, graduating from voyeur to full-part actor.

But please, no more of these macabre conversations, they give me the creeps. Let's go and have a drink and talk about something more cheerful.

The fly in the ointment is that the new love story is not that cheerful (this is still Javier Marias we're dealing with here), and the conversations about the dead man continue, drawing numerous parallels to the Balzac hero, Colonel Chabert, who returns from the dead to find all his assets sold and his wife married to somebody else. The implication here being that Diaz-Varela might have something to do with the tragic death of his friend Desvern.

Among the interesting developments in this second half of the novel, are the pragmatic views of Maria on modern romance:

We cannot pretend to be the first or the favourite, we are merely what is available, the leftovers, the leaving, the survivors, the remnants, the remaindered goods, and it is on this somewhat ignoble basis that the greatest loves are built and on which the greatest families are founded, and from which we all come, the product of chance and making do, of other people's rejections and timidities and failures, and yet we would give anything sometimes to stay by the side of the person we rescued from an attic or a clearance sale, or won in a game of cards or who picked us up from among the scraps; strange though it may seem, we manage to believe in these chance fallings in love, and many think they can see the hand of destiny in what is really nothing more than a village raffle at the fag-end of summer...

also, in her own words:
His was merely a brief hope cut short, a hope that was inevitable tenuous and somewhat sceptical, because an absence of enthusiasm is not something that can be easily concealed and is obvious even to the most optimistic of lovers.

And I must once again underline how Marias is a writer's writer, self-aware and self-assured to include the keys to his enigma in plain view:

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happens in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.

and again:
I was entirely dependent on him now, as one always is on the person doing the telling, for he is the one who decides where to begin and where to end, what to reveal and suggest and keep silent about, when to tell the truth and when to lie or whether to combine the two so that neither is recognizable, or whether to deceive with the truth, as I had initially suspected he was trying to do with me;

So, what did I take from my lecture? My admiration for the author is reaffirmed, although I'm not in a hurry to return to his often disturbing imaginary settings. And I want to read that Balzac novella he considers so important.

[Alma · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O erro de julgar que o presente é para sempre, que o que há a cada instante é definitivo, quando todos deveríamos saber que nada o é, enquanto nos restar algum tempo. Trazemos às costas as suficientes reviravoltas e os suficientes circuitos, não apenas da fortuna mas do nosso ânimo. Vamos aprendendo que o que nos pareceu gravíssimo chegará o dia em que será neutro, apenas um facto, apenas um dado."

[Dalia Nourelden · Rating 3 out of 5]

اخيرااا خلصت

اسلوب الرواية و الاطالة الزائدة والاعادة المستمرة لايصال المعلومة اصابنى احيانا بالملل وكثيرا فكرت ان اتركها لكن حين كنت اقرر تركها أجد جملة او تعبير يعيد رغبتى فى استكمالها ، فرغم بطئها لكن أعجبنى الشرح الدقيق للمشاعر ودواخل وافكار الشخصيات كان جميل ، لكن إعادةالشرح احيانا والاطالة كانت تفقد الاشياء جمالها

فتاة تعمل فى دار نشر تتصادف يوميا لرؤية زوجين يتناولوا امامها الافطار يوميا تعجبها تصرفاتهم ونظراتهم تسميهم فى داخلها بالزوجين الكاملين



لم يتبادلوا الحديث ولم يتبادلوا سوى ايماءات الترحيب من بعيد لكنهم يجعلوا ليومها بهجة وفجأة يختفون لتعرف فيما بعد ان الزوج قد قتل فى حادثة بشعة ، لتتحدث الفتاة مع الزوجة لاول مرة وتعرف منها انهم ايضا كانوا يعرفونها و كانوا يطلقون عليها اسم الفتاة الرصينة

وتأخذنا الرواية فى الحديث عن الموت وعن مشاعر الاحياء بعد وفاة احبتهم ، وهل اذا عاد الاموات سيجدون موقعهم لايزال موجودا ام سيجدونه مشغولا بأخرين ؟ هل سيجدون الترحيب ام الغضب والغيظ من عودتهم .

ثم تأخذ الرواية بعد المنتصف تقريبا بعض المنحنيات المختلفة .

الرواية بها الحب والخيانة والغدر ، الحديث عن الموت والحياة ، الجرائم التى يحاول مرتكبيها اعطاء انفسهم والآخرين مبررات واهية وساذجة ، الجرائم التى يعاقب بها المجرم لكنه ليس الوحيد المجرم ، فهناك مجرميين اخريين مختفيين لن يطولهم القانون ولن يعرف بهم سوى القليل

"إنها عملية قتل لا أكثر "

٣ / ٩ / ٢٠١٩

[Oriana]

You guys oh no I accidentally abandoned this book.

I mean, it wasn't actually an accident; I just came to the unignorable conclusion after 90ish pages that opening this book had become like being in one of those dreams where every part of your body is SO HEAVY that you can't even wiggle a single toe. Every time I thought about picking this up, suddenly I was rearranging the condiments in my fridge or mindlessly scrolling through Instagrams I'd already looked at like four times.

And I can't even really explain why! Okay well actually yes, I can: the writing. Because the plot is really interesting (I think?), but he has this quicksandy style where each sentence has like 400 subclauses and is approximately three pages long, and it's not like lush descriptions that you melt into, it's these endless imagined conversations each character has with herself, sort of narrating a scene that occurred offscreen, or tootling through a remembered moment, or methodically projecting some made-up anecdote that happened to someone else. I don't even know how to explain it or my distaste for it, especially because I am no slouch when it comes to long sentences and unusual writing styles. But this one just made me go nope nope nope and stare off into space on the subway when I should have been reading.

Life is too short, you guys. Right?

Although I would like to remind anyone keeping track that I don't even have a shelf for abandoned books because it happens so rarely that I don't persevere; I only have "didn't finish—yet," which is where this sucker is going until some hopeful later date when I will come back to it and be thrilled instead of so bored I already fell asleep just thinking about reading one more paragraph.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Withdrawn from South Dublin Libraries - Clondalkin Branch
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Description: The Infatuations is a metaphysical murder mystery and a stunningly original literary achievement by Javier Marías, the internationally acclaimed author of A Heart So White and Your Face Tomorrow.

Every day, María Dolz stops for breakfast at the same café. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren't there, and she feels obscurely bereft.

It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the café with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death.

With The Infatuations, Javier Marías brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love and morality.

The Infatuations is an extraordinary, immersive book about the terrible force of events and their consequences.

Opening: The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much as a single word.

The first thing I thought when I saw this cover was - "that's Fairground Attraction":

All I can find on this image is: Magnum photographer Elliot Erwitt and was taken in 1955.

Apart from the obvious Eddi Reader songs playing parkour through my synapses, I also heard this as a hattip to our narrator. And whilst I'm filching from the Fab Four, there is only one song that goes with this mental tongue-twister of a discovery:

"If the real me is is this woman constantly making all these associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me so completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I've been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I am not, indefinitely."

You can't spoon-feed me irrationals, Marias, I will have to keep a specific lookout for where you make a point of saying, through a character, that people change with events, they drastically change after drastic events.

'Professor Rico was wearing a charming Nazi-green jacket and an ivory-coloured shirt; his nonchalantly knotted tie was a brighter, more luminous green - melon green perhaps.' hmm

If only that applied to this book! I only mean that halfway seriously because some of the musing was addictive, especially concerning Balzac and Athos.

5* Tomorrow in Battle Think on Me
3* The Infatuations

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Çağdaş İspanyol yazar Javier Marias'tan okuduğum ilk kitap oldu bu roman. Derin, felsefi bir aşk ve cinayet romanı. Aslında bu tanım da kitabın tam hakkını vermiyor. Müthiş bir tempoda başlıyor, okuyanı içine çekiyor ve daha sonra farklı katmanlar içinde yaşamın ve ölümün anlamı, ölenin ardında kalanların yaşam tercihleri, duygusal ilişkilerdeki eşitsizlikler, işlenen suçların nasıl hasıraltı edilebildiği veya haklı gösterilebildiği gibi kavramlar üzerine düşündürüyor. Çarpıcı da bir finali var. Bazen gerçekleri fazla deşmemenin hayatı kolaylaştırabileceği, mutluluk getirebileceği gibi tartışmalı bir temayı okuyanların değerlendirmesine sunuyor.

Ustaca işlenen olay örgüsü ve karakterleri (yan karakterlerden karanlık, kart ama sevimli zampara Ruiberriz de unutulacak gibi değil), zaman zaman bir felsefe eseri okuduğunuzu hissetiren yönleri - ki bu bakımdan özellikle anlatıcı Maria'nın bazı ifadeleri pedantik veya fazla iddialı olduğu gerekçesiyle eleştirilebilir de - ve güçlü üslubuyla önemli bir roman. Romanda epey tartışılan Balzac'ın novellası Albay Chabert'i de bir gün okumak lazım diyerek bitireyim.

[merixien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karasevdalılar, Javier Marias’ın Yarınki Yüzün üçlemesinden sonra ve kendi deyimiyle “ roman sanatında- herhangi bir şekilde- söyleyecek bir şeyinin kalmadığı”nı düşündüğü bir dönemde yazdığı ilk kitabı. Zaten yaşadığı bu şüpheyi ve tereddütü kitabı okumaya başladığınıza hissediyorsunuz. Diğer kitaplarından alıştığımız o ilk sayfadan okurunu alaşağı eden klasik Marias romanlarının açışılından biraz daha farklı başlıyor. Yine büyük bir gizemin peşinden gideceğinizi biliyorsunuz ancak bunun doğurduğu merakın dozu sayfalar ilerledikçe artıyor. Zaten Javier Marias da yazım süreci ilerledikçe şüphelerinin hafiflemeye başladığını ve böylece hikayenin şekillendiğini belirtiyor.

Konusuna gelecek olursak, Marias’ın en çok sevdiği ölüm, aşk ve insan açmazlarını merkeze anlan bir hikaye okuyorsunuz. Ancak Beyaz Kalp ya da benzer alanda gezinen diğer bir kitap olarak Yarın Savaşta Beni Düşün gibi kurgunun ön planda olduğu, gizemin peşinden sürüklendiğiniz kitaplardan birisi değil. Zira eğer Albay Chabert’i okuduysanız ve o kitabın adının anılmaya başladığı noktaya geldiyseniz sizin için işin gizemi büyük ölçüde çözülüyor. Lakin Marias’ın derdinin de bir gizemle okurun aklını almak olmadığı o kadar açık ki. Zira kitabı okuyup bitirdiğinizde; olayları birbirine bağlamaktan ziyade ölüm, geride kalan olma hali, cezasız suçlar ve sevda ile aşk arasındaki ayrım üzerine düşünecek bir çok şey bırakıyor size. Ben okurken sanki kurgunun arkasına sığınan bir deneme kitabı yazmak istediğini hissettim. Çünkü Javier Marias’ın kullandığı dolambaçlı dilin ve uzun cümlelerinin aşinası olsanız da bu sefer diyaloglarda dahi üzerine düşünülmüş- yapay görünen bir durum olduğunu fark edeceksinizdir. Bir kurgu akışından ziyade bir dert anlatmanın peşinde gibi. Tamamen gri bir bölgede, asla empati kurmak istemeyeceğini bir durumun ortasından büyük bir sorgunun ortasına atılıyorsunuz. Kitaba dair kafama takılan tek nokta, bazı şeyleri açıklarken düştüğü tekrar durumu. Kitabın kendi içinde bir tekrar söz konusu değil ancak bazı cümlelere daha önceden okuduğum Tüm Ruhlar ya da Yarınki Yüzün gibi kitaplarında da rastladığımı farkettim. Sanırım bu da ilk başta bahsettiğim, şüphe döneminin etkilerinden olsa gerek. Zaten iç dünyasında yaşadığı bu süreci siz de kitabı okurken adım adım izliyorsunuz aslında. Benim de - doğal olarak- en sevdiğim bölüm Javier ile Maria’nın karşılıklı sohbet ya da hesaplaşma - artık adına ne derseniz- bölümü oldu. Bittiğinde empati kurmaya çalışsam da içinden çıkamadığım bir açmazla ve şüpheyle baş başa kaldım. İnsanlık tarihin ve edebiyatın en asil duygusu olan sevdanlanma haline aynı zamana insanı en aşağılık seviyeye çekebilir mi ve büyük suçların dahi cezasız kalmasını sağlayabilir mi? Ritmi oldukça yavaş olmasına karşın, şüphenin hiç kaybolmadığı bu yüzden de gerilimi koruyan, etkileyici bir okuma oldu. Javier Marias seviyorsanız mutlaka okuyun ancak ilk defa tanışacaksanız her aşamasında kendisini gösterdiği Beyaz Kalp, Acı Bir Başlangıç Bu ya da Yarın Savaşta Beni Düşün ile başlamanızı tavsiye ederim.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marías chooses a female character, Maria, to narrate this European-style psychological thriller with a slow reveal that turns on a dime in the final chapters. Maria works in a publishing company and every day on her break from work she sees an intriguing couple, married, having coffee together. They look so happy and in love that Maria finds herself looking forward to seeing them in the coffee shop. Sometimes she overhears scraps of conversation and pieces together a life for them without them taking notice of her.

On the very first page of this novel we learn a man is murdered. It is the man of the couple Maria is so interested in. Maria tells us the last time she saw the man was the last time his own wife saw him. It didn’t seem fair, she thinks, for them to share that intimacy for she didn’t even know his name until she saw the report of his death on television.

Marías, Maria: the names one suspects are intentionally close in sound and structure for it is very rare to find a character give up her thoughts so completely to an author. In this novel Marías resides inside the mind of Maria, and almost everything that she thinks over a period of weeks and months is recorded here for us to consider. The world from her view gives us a distance from the victim, his wife, his friend, and the perpetrator of the crime.

This novel addresses some themes: the closeness of love and envy; our closest friends can be our greatest enemies; love and distaste; there is an uncertainty that comes with intimacy. In this brief video interview, Marías talks about his themes, one of which is betrayal.

Marías’ style--reflective, reflexive, recursive, chatty, digressive—would not work if it weren’t at the same time fiercely intelligent and deeply thoughtful. He is funny, too, as though he has caught onto a joke before we had and can explain it to us. The author is like translator himself, seeking for ways to express an idea, a word, a concept. Long, long sentences and paragraphs punctuated with ellipses and em-dashes show the ongoing thoughts of the narrator and her interpretation of what she finds out when she introduces herself to the wife of the murdered man.

After listening to this novel, my first foray into Marías’ work, I went looking for information about the author. His Goodreads site mentions Proust, William Faulkner, and the German writer Thomas Bernhard as influences, and it is not difficult to see these influences in the ebb and flow of internal dialogue that runs alongside the action in this novel.

I listened to the audio of this title produced by Penguin Random House, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and read by Justine Eyre. The translation is extremely impressive for stream-of-consciousness writing and reading, perfectly understandable and involving. A capacious mind and a brilliant translator will keep one occupied for days.

[Scribble Orca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know. I know you are looking at those stars and saying "Tja. Typical." But let me plead clemency by claiming somewhere between three and four and to be highly recommended by such reviews as:

this, (forthcoming) from the Marias Man of the Moment;

this, a discerning and appreciative reflection; and

this (undoubtedly) scholarly and analytical appraisal.

If even half of what is printed in the name of publishing were of the quality of Marias' prose, laments about the dearth of decent reading material would reduce exponentially. He weaves strands with an effortless dexterity and offers nuggets of wisdom about the human character as lightly as a pebble is tossed into a stream; the problem was that I expected a grander show of linguistic acrobatics. Well worth your reading time, even if this reader was left looking at the party through the window and wishing the invite had afforded entry.

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 5 out of 5]

kemal sunal'ın korkusuz korkak çocukluğumun en sevdiğim filmlerinden biridir. o konuyu alıp böylesi bir roman haline getirmek ise işte edebiyatın büyüsü oluyor.
aşk'la sevda'nın farkının bu denli derin irdelendiği, upuzun konuşma ve düşünme cümleleriyle yazılmış -çeviri çok iyi- bir kara roman.
balzac'ın albay chabert'i ve dumas'nın üç silahşörler'ini okuma isteği uyandıracak denli kusursuz göndermeleriyle, ölü kimdir, ölen ya da arkada kalan mıdır asıl mağdur sorularıyla bitirilen bir roman...
ve ayrıca kahraman bir yayınevinde editör olduğu için bahsi geldi, galiba tüm dünyada bir genç yazar fütursuzluğu, ukalalığı, yaşlı yazar çekilmezliği var :)

[Zaphirenia · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5/5

"Μια νουβέλα είναι, και ό,τι συμβαίνει στις νουβέλες και στα μυθιστορήματα δεν έχει σημασία και λησμονιέται μόλις τα τελειώσει κανείς."

Δε θα μπορούσα να το πω καλύτερα από ό,τι ο ίδιος ο Μαρίας. Πραγματικά, προβλέπω ότι με το που τελείωσα αυτό το βιβλίο θα το ξεχάσω, είναι βέβαιο ότι η μνήμη μου δε θα το καταγράψει ως κάτι αρκετά ενδιαφέρον ώστε να φυλάξει για αυτό κάποια ιδιαίτερη θέση.

Καταρχάς, θα έπρεπε να είναι τουλάχιστον μισό σε έκταση. Τις τελευταίες εκατό σελίδες τις διάβασα διαγώνια και με αρκετή δυσφορία για τις πολλές επαναλήψεις, τη φλυαρία, την τόση φιλοσοφία και ψυχανάλυση. Ενώ αρχικά είχε ενδιαφέρον όλη αυτή η εσωτερική επεξεργασία των συναισθημάτων και των ψυχικών μεταπτώσεων, καθώς και η ανάπτυξη των θεμάτων του έρωτα και του θανάτου, κάπου λίγο έλεος, τετρακόσιες σελίδες είναι πραγματικά πάρα πολλές για να αναμασά τα ίδια πράγματα. Μάλιστα, δεν μας λέει κάτι ιδιαίτερα πρωτότυπο ή νέο, κάτι που θα εντυπωσιάσει τον αναγνώστη τόσο βαθιά ώστε η φλυαρία να βοηθά να "κάτσει" μέσα του η καινούρια ιδέα. Όχι, καθόλου. Απλά, καθημερινά πράγματα διαβάζουμε, σκέψεις που τις κάνουμε όλοι μας λίγο ή πολύ κατά τη διάρκεια της ζωής μας. Τις παρουσιάζει αρκετά καλά μεν, θα μπορούσε και με πολύ λιγότερες λέξεις δε, ώστε να μην κουράζει με την τόση επανάληψη. Πιστεύω ότι ως νουβέλα θα ήταν αρκετά πιο μεστό και δεμένο, ως μυθιστόρημα όμως ήταν σα μισοφουσκωμένο θαλάσσιο στρώμα.

[mkld · Rating 5 out of 5]

Javier Marías tiene un estilo muy particular. Tengo la suerte de conectar perfectamente con él, y la lectura de sus obras se me hace rapidísima e interesante. Conozco a gente que nunca ha podido acabar un libro suyo. Como siempre, al hilo de una historia, Marías aprovecha para la reflexión y analiza aspectos cotidianos de la vida que me hacen decir constantemente "eso ya lo había pensado yo". Sus reflexiones, su lógica, se parecen tanto a la mía, que me parece estar escuchando mi propio pensamiento.
La trama, como es habitual en las novelas suyas que he leído, es simple pero jugosa. No hay mucha acción, pero los pensamientos de los personajes llenan el relato. Siempre he pensado que no se podría adaptar una novela de Marías al cine, se perdería toda su riqueza.
A quien esté pensando en leerlo, recomiendo que lo intente con las 50 primeras páginas. Si se le hace arduo o no llega a entrar en la reflexión, que lo deje, porque no habrá captado el compás del autor.