The Infatuations

Rarely have I read a novelist so in love with his own words. Marías babbles on inordinately, with long run-on sentences that mull over characters and their motivations in the most ponderous of ways, often repeating himself or ending up in highly questionable positions. Each of his characters speak the same way, in lengthy exposition, sounding like the 61-year-old author in everything down to their cultural references. Seriously, it’s as if there was zero attempt to revise or pare down a first draft. The plot is extremely thin and quite honestly, this should have been a 30 page short story. It’s an order of magnitude longer, and I felt every bit of that.

Marías delves into justice (or the lack thereof), how people are often show more substitutes for others in the lives of their partners, and how we move on after trauma or the death of a loved one, but rarely in satisfying ways, and often arriving at some bizarre conclusions. “In a sense, he cannot wish that it [his father’s brutal murder during the Spanish Civil War] hadn’t happened, because if it hadn’t, he would be a different person, and he has no idea who that person would be.” Good lord, talking about taking not knowing when a philosophical argument has gone too far. “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 poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised…” What? I genuinely feel sorry for Marías if this was a sentiment true to him in life. There are other examples.

I kept hoping that this novel would turn the corner after a nice slow burn, but it never did. The second half had some opportunities to pay off, but instead repeated the same tired concepts. I don’t know how many times he said “we don’t really care what happens in books and films and forget about them once they’re over,” but it was too many, and in this case, I truly do hope I can forget this book. show less

In a column written for El País and appended to the edition I read, Marías claims that his latest novel is thoroughly pessimistic and contains no comic scenes at all. That isn't entirely true, of course. This is a book that takes a very gloomy view of human nature and modern society - as he says in the El País Article, one of the big themes in the novel is the “problem of impunity”, the way we allow each other to get away with terrible acts - but there is actually quite a lot of comedy below the surface. For one thing, Marías is clearly sending up his own style. There is not one “interrupted doorbell” scene but two: in both cases we get several chapters between the pressing of the bell and the opening of the door. The death show more of an important character is announced on page one. There's a character called Javier who has incredibly sexy lips, expects his girlfriends to leave their skirts on during sex, and talks exactly like the narrator of a Javier Marías novel (the actual narrator this time is called María(!)). Since María is a publisher, there are plenty of opportunities for little digs at the vanity of authors. And so on.
The usual clarity and density of ideas we expect from Marías is there, as is the slightly unexpected mix of literary inspirations that Marías draws on, turns upside-down, uses to give us false leads about where the plot is going, and generally gets more out of than their authors ever could have imagined: Balzac and Dumas in particular, this time, and of course the inevitable references to Macbeth. But it's definitely Macbeth without MacDuff this time: whatever effect the bad things people do might have on their own consciences, we shouldn't expect to see trees heading for Dunsinane any time soon.
Probably the best thing Marías has done apart from the trilogy, and highly recommended unless you are an incurable romantic. show less

Warning, Marias is a deep dive into the flow of the human mind, and relentless pursuer of the mind’s possibilities and always its (perhaps really our) frailties. His narrators hunt down thoughts and connections in that perhaps most secure place where they are freest to go. No one else can enter that space and stop where the mind can go. Yet, it is not hermetically sealed from the outside world, most of its operations are irrational and subject to external stimuli. Yet it tries so hard to figure what goes on around and within.

Maria Dolz goes to the same café every day before work for breakfast before heading off to her work in a publishing house where she hates her authors. They all seem vain, ridiculous, demanding and their show more peccadillos tedious and even kind of creepy. One of them fantasises aloud about waiting for his call from the Swedish Academy about his Nobel Prize. Maria doesn’t think much of his writing. But there are more interesting people in her life which is why she’s always late. She observes on most days, the couple she is enamoured of who sit more or less opposite her each day. The couple clearly adore each other. She imagines their life and is charmed by their affection to each other – the way they laugh, the way they touch and so she spends her time constructing a narrative of how wonderful they are together.

That is one level of infatuation. But I had a little trouble with that word. Marias uses the plural. So I went to the dictionary to look up the title word and found infatuation to mean a brief and intense fascination. But the original Spanish los enamoramientos means crushes. Infatuation surely has a broader meaning than crush, which has a sexual component to it, doesn’t it? I wondered if I make too much of this translation complication. It's less complication than an interesting narrative idea since an infatuation is a deeply felt thing, even if it is thought brief and in the long run perhaps ridiculous. Intense preoccupations form the kind of narratives like this very novel, of intrigue, constant probing, constantly looking for interpretations. And literature provides such forms. And I'll confess something here, I am enamoured of Mariás work. Perhaps infatuated. No. I'm reasoning here that he is terrific at delving deep into the labyrinth of the human mind.

Marias was a translator into Spanish from English and had a very wide and deep knowledge of English literature. He loves to play with us as readers. He reminds us that literature is born out of not only our experiences but also other literature. He uses lines and ideas from works such as Shakespeare as leitmotifs throughout his work, including this one. From MacBeth we have that line

“she should have died hereafter, there would’ve been a time for such a word.”

Our narrator, Maria, quotes this often as she delves into the fascinations, she has with what happens to this couple. Now, the problem here is that while this is less a plot driven work, there are events that really cannot be mentioned. Not so much because they spoil the reading experience, but because Marias is very good at building the narrative – based on Maria’s serpentine thoughts. They stretch far and wide. She becomes the lover of Javier Díaz-Varela - the close friend of the couple she observes in the café. She adores him, is obsessed by his looks, especially his beautiful lips. She cannot take her eyes off his lips when he speaks and adores listening to him speak without really thinking. She waits, she listens, she talks about literature – there is a whole sidestory that goes on about a story by Balzac called Colonel Chabert about a colonel in Napolean’s army who is pronounced dead by the two doctors and is placed on a pile of the dead. Only, he awakens naked among the moans of the wounded and stench of the dead and then forgotten for ten years, impoverished and alone, sets off to tell a lawyer who he is seeking to have his identity returned to him. Meanwhile his wife has remarried, his estate has gone to her and he has nothing. This story tells us that it perhaps better to be dead, that the ‘dead’ cannot return to their life. That the world changes rapidly.

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.

And all this death talk is necessary because there is a significant death in the novel that propels the narrative. It takes us further into an interesting theme that we can know so little about what is going on, we can think – like Maria does – long and hard about events, people, their character and yet know next to nothing. We fill in these absences and limits to knowledge with narratives. In a sense narratives become the truth we cannot know. And writing, the great medium through which we can explore what we don’t know or struggle to understand. The probing mind of Maria is at times like a dog with a bone, unable to let go, returning, like a novel itself to the very subject it wants to explore. When mourning, whether a death or a loved one, or an infatuation, Maria understands that everything ends and ebbs.

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.

Marias shifts us from vivid passionate emotions to the mental process of change and the shedding of the past. Though memories persevere, their substance and meaning are also transformed, used in new ways to get past the past.

Javier Marias left us with quite a few novels. I’ve now read a few, but there are more. The interior world of his narrators is complex and they themselves realise their own limits and frailties. They are good company on a long road. show less

For several years, single, thirty-something María Dolz has breakfasted at a café located near the publishing firm where she works. Over the course of many cups of coffee she has observed, but never interacted with, a conspicuously attractive husband and wife whom she has privately labeled “The Perfect Couple”: they radiate an air of serenity and contentment that she finds reassuring, and which helps her get through her busy days at the office and provides a welcome distraction from the emotional inertia of her own life. When for several days the couple fail to show up at the café, she assumes they have gone on holiday, until she reads in the newspaper that the husband, Miguel Desvern, has been violently murdered, stabbed to death show more on the street in broad daylight by a mentally unstable homeless man. Saddened but also perplexed by the deep sense of loss she is suffering over the death of someone she never met, María is driven to take a risk: later, when the wife, Luisa, returns to the café, María introduces herself and confesses to Miguel’s widow the important role that Luisa and her husband played in her life. María’s intention is innocent: to provide momentary solace amidst inconsolable grief. But her decision to approach Luisa proves fateful: this impulsive act of kindness leads her into a morally ambiguous and potentially dangerous situation involving secrets, deception, shady characters and possibly murderous intent. Javier Marías is a restlessly inquisitive novelist whose interest in human behaviour is metaphysical and intellectual. It’s probably fair to say that The Infatuations is a mystery novel like no other. Using a dense and highly ruminative writing style, he sets up a situation that is only a starting point for lengthy philosophical musings and conversations that go on for pages as characters dissect each other’s actions, speculate on possible motivations, discuss the relevant literature and historical antecedents, and seek to understand what their interlocutors are trying to reveal or cover up. Most of the action in this novel takes place in the form of words being exchanged (usually over a beverage of some sort) in living rooms, on sidewalks and in cafés or restaurants. Blood-letting and other events of life-altering consequence take place off stage. Because The Infatuations is a novel in which very little is as it appears, the story generates great uncertainty and the truth always seems tantalizingly just out of reach. In the end the reader is left wondering what is real, what is false, and what actually happened. show less

At page 302 of the 338-page The Infatuations author Javier Marías begins a new section this way: “In the end, everything tends toward attenuation …” As characters try to navigate the thorny issues arising when life and love intersect with self-interest and betrayal, they attenuate their guilt and downplay their responsibilities as a way of going on with their lives. With the help of an endlessly speculating and imaginative first person narrator, the author delivers a tour de force on the very unusual agenda he set for himself. It’s amazingly well done.

This narrator becomes aware that someone she knew by sight is murdered in the street. Committed by an addled and aggressive homeless man, it seems a random, senseless crime. show more Almost by chance she meets and gets involved with a friend of the murdered man’s family, but overhears a highly incriminating conversation between this man and an apparent co-conspirator. Explanations (and attenuations) aside, she must weigh what she thinks she knows (but has no proof of) against her conscience. Her line of reasoning features doubt, a sense of powerlessness, and a tinge of fear. This story manages a measure of suspense for our protagonist, because this man she came to love is involved in a grisly crime and she may know too much.

Sr Marías cites some high-end literary antecedents in his discussion of death. MacBeth complains about the timing of his wife’s death; Balzac’s Colonel Chabert returns home an apparent Lazarus to consternation and rejection; Athos summarily executes his new bride in The Three Musketeers, only to have her return from the dead. In each case the timing of the death remains arbitrary and independent, outside the control of the living. The death in The Infatuations, although set in motion by a conspiracy, won’t result in a return for the corpse, and the crime’s chief instigator will not face justice for it. It’s a chilling proposition, one that hits close to home.

The author treads extremely carefully with his plot. He makes rather obvious that a murder conspiracy has succeeded, but that everyone’s involvement in it, including the narrator’s, has been extenuated, temporized, and attenuated, until at last no one suffers any consequences. It’s an exact, careful job of setting up and executing this narrative: it’s powerful because of the skill displayed. As a statement on modern public morals, it’s chillingly to the point, and devastating. show less

It is not only time that is a theme of this book but also uncertainty. That is the uncertainty we have in the evidence of our senses due to both our own point of view and lack of evidence. With a dramatic opening, a murder on the first page, the reader is drawn into a mysterious narrative. It is also a personal narrative told from the perspective of Maria Dolz who by happenstance, due to her habit of stopping at the same cafe each day before work, recognizes the newspaper photo of the man who was killed. We are given his name in the first sentence of the book, "Miguel Desvern or Deverne", and we are also introduced to uncertainty for Maria is not entirely sure of his exact name. It seems that her acquaintance with Miguel and his wife show more began as she shared breakfast each day with them, but only "at a distance". Somewhat voyeuristically she would study them each morning as she sipped her coffee, but had never actually met them. Dolz has “only ever caught fragments of their conversation, or just the odd word or two,” and she is compelled enough by their presence and manner to wish them “all the best in the world, as if they were characters in a novel". Thus the mystery grows and the reader is left wondering, at the end of the first chapter, where do we go from here?

Gradually she comes to know the widow, Luisa, after approaching her months later, at the same café, to offer condolences, albeit as a stranger. As it turns out, the “Perfect Couple” were watching too, perhaps less obsessively, as Luisa welcomes her back to her apartment and reveals they had both referred to the solitary Dolz as the “Prudent Young Woman.” Marías reveals all of this efficiently, then sets it aside in the early pages of his four-part Infatuations. Death is not the spoiler here. The novel’s remaining three acts provide new directions, digressions, and fodder for those readers with patience for Marias' sometimes Jamesian prose. Introduced on the first page, the idea of death is pervasive throughout, for example:
"not having been born is not the same as having died, because the person who dies always leaves some trace behind him and he knows that."
These traces of life that are left by the dead play an important role in the narrative, but there are also ruminations on time, truth, memory, envy, and infatuation, especially the last which is what sweeps Maria into an affair of a sort with a friend of Luisa..

There are long expository passages devoted to Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert, whose plot commands almost as much detective work as Miguel’s murder. There are recurring passages from Macbeth, Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and some Keats for good measure. There is also a tendency for María to speculate about pages-long scenarios only to yank them away (after the reader’s imagination has been fully invested) with a dismissive, “Not that any of those things would happen,” or, “I didn’t actually think all this.” In fact, for much of The Infatuations,the action doesn’t so much happen as get discussed.

This is not to say that the novel does not have a denouement and resolution. But as one character contends, during a discussion of Balzac’s Chabert: “What happened is the least of it… What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot we recall more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.” As this is true in reading Balzac it is also true in the narrative presented as The Infatuations; a bit of meta fiction. This is done so well that life and fiction seem like inventions often made from the same materials. The prose style plays with time again and again and the uncertainty lasts through the last twist of interaction between the characters. This is a novel that, as I mentioned, requires investing in patience, but for the reader who perseveres its rewards make that investment worthwhile. show less

OS ENAMORAMENTOS, JAVIER MARÍAS

Bem-vindos ao mundo de Javier Marías. Um universo paralelo que existe a escassos centímetros do mundo real. Em muito se assemelha a este, embora seja completamente diferente. Desde logo, pela forma como decorre o tempo, um tempo de veludo e alcatifas, prenhe e distendido. É um universo implausível, não pelos acontecimentos narrados, mas pela sua natureza literária – contudo, o autor consegue-nos convencer do contrário. O seu estilo forrado, com longas frases e parágrafos, envolve o leitor numa penumbra confortável, um sussurro melódico que preenche tudo, não deixando espaço para a descrença – tal como os seus personagens, somos colocados à escuta numa antecâmera, invisíveis, esperando show more que o lento gotejar das frases revele a trama, um engodo para algo mais profundo. E tal como eles acreditamos ou não: porque é tão difícil perceber se alguém está a mentir – tanto progresso e estamos sujeitos a isso; e é tão fácil incutir dúvidas num interlocutor. Essa é a natureza da própria ficção e o leitor é enredado nesta trama metafísica: como não acreditar se tudo é ao mesmo tempo falsificado e possível.

Há uns meses li o ‘Coração tão branco’, que também me causou uma profunda impressão. Num comentário à minha publicação da altura, alguém apontou, e com toda a razão, que esse romance fazia parte de um conjunto de três ou quatro romances (em que se inclui ‘Os enamoramentos’) muito similares no estilo, temática e estrutura.São quase o mesmo romance, de tal forma se assemelham. E essa semelhança chega a ser aterradora, esmagando o leitor pelo efeito de conjunto.

Tal como no ‘Coração tão branco’, nos ‘Enamoramentos’ há também uma trama de género policial relativamente sofisticada. Mas se atentarmos bem à sua essência percebemos que é relativamente simples, sendo, por outro lado, o resultado muito mais impressionante. Percebemos que é apenas um pretexto. O romance é uma exploração metafísica sobre a natureza humana, a moral, o amor e a própria ficção – e as suas teses são pungentes. show less