21st Century Literature discussion

Despite being knee-deep in reading between our October event and the beginning of the literary award season, your tireless moderators managed to band together and select our Moderator Pick for the month of November:

The Infatuations by Javier Marías

Hopefully you'll join us for the discussion!

Here are the other books that were considered for the November pick:

Canada by Richard Ford

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

Min kamp 1 by Karl Ove Knausgård

I hope I'll have time to read this and join in with the discussion. A great choice of author, and one of his I haven't read into the bargain :-)

'Sentence by glorious sentence, is there a better novelist alive in Europe right now than Javier Marias?'

-- The Independent

'The Infatuations is mysterious and seductive; it's got deception, it's got love affairs, it's got murder — the book is the most sheerly addictive thing Marías has ever written. It hooks you from its very first lines.

Like all of all of Marías' work, The Infatuations is unsettling, even slightly sinister, because it confronts us with thoughts we'd rather not hear: that morality is provisional and can be corrupted by many things, including love; that to survive, we invariably start forgetting the lost loved ones whose memory we once clung to. Most unsettling of all, Marías suggests that our self, this thing we call "I," is not something solid and immutable. Like our narrator, we cobble ourselves together from moment to moment out of malleable memories, stories we've heard and fictions we tell ourselves to impose meaning on what's going on around us.'

-- NPR

'Great art often emerges from breaking…or at least tweaking…rules. A work that transcends its conventions can produce special results.

Here’s such a book.

Described by some as “metaphysical inquiry” but disguised as a murder mystery, The Infatuations takes you where very few novels do…to dark thoughts and long passages of suggested theories or, at times, even to entirely imagined conversations between characters. Plot advancement takes a back seat. Instead, a narrator’s thoughts offer various perspectives on life, death and love…and, appropriately, infatuation.'

-- Paste Magazine

I have no idea how I will fit this in, but I want to read this! Too many books! (-:

only read the Ford on that list - which is amazing. Others, including the pick sound interesting though.

Well ribs is a book to add to the pile! What a good choice. Look forward to reading the groups comments.

It sounds interesting. I will definitely add the author to ones I need to sample, but neither work nor my already jam-packed TBR shelf are going to permit me to read it in November!