Reviews: The Infatuations (23)

This is a tale about a woman who goes to a cafe every morning and she sees the same "perfect" couple every day too. However, one day they aren't there and she soon finds out that the husband has been murdered.
This book had great potential to be amazing. However, at parts it just dragged on and i found myself forcing to turn the pages.
I expected good things from this book but in the end, it was disappointing.

I'd been recommended Javier Marias' 'A Heart So White' by a friend and thought he was a wonderfully talented writer. Safe to say 'The Infatuations' delivers yet another excellent, thought provoking and often beautifully woven story of love, loss and life. Marias has a talent with words and this is certainly not one to miss. I loved it.

Marias must be one of the best novelists alive. He is something of an aquired taste though. At first I didn't take to his philosophical, meandering style, which is like late Henry James crossed with Proust in a particularly ponderous mood. I persisted though and something clicked and now I'm eagerly making my way through his backlist.
This novel would be the ideal place to start if you are new to Marias's writing. If you're already a fan then this is up there with his best, think of it as doing for the murder story what Your Face Tomorrow did for the espionage novel.
If the King of Redonda reference is a mystery to you then read The Dark Back of Time, one of the best books I've read in years.

This is certainly a different sort of crime novel. In fact it would be too simple to categorise it as just that. It is a love story, a philosophical work and a crime novel all in one. Javier Marias is a great writer, of that I have no doubt, and in this story he does explore his characters and their thoughts, feelings and motivations in depth.
But the story lacks pace and does not have the twists and turns you might expect from a story where the central drama is a possible murder.
Once I had settled into it, I began to enjoy listening to the narrator expounding about her life and the people she meets and with whom she becomes involved . I did wonder in parts whether the author had captured the true female perspective (if indeed there is one) to some of the decisions and dilemmas that the central character faces.
I found the book ponderous.. but in a good way I think.

Through the perceptions of Maria Dolz - the Prudent Young Woman - we are told the tale of the seemingly random murder of half of the Perfect Couple. That the murder is not what it seems is revealed too slowly for its lack of surprise in a plot that is both slight and unlikely.

But this is not a thriller: the core event serves as the warp through which the author threads his weft with a technique that in turn irritates, confuses, amazes and amuses; what is offered is a tapestry – only in part worth hanging - of love and longing, of death and life, of the human condition.

Dolz says of her own conversational skills that she "couldn't come up with anything that wasn't either clumsy or unnecessarily complicated". And so it is she expresses her thoughts with an extraordinary sentence structure, questioning and qualifying her own assertions, often within the same sentence. The effect is both conversational and rambling; both convoluted and indistinct.

This is no defect of the author, but seemingly quite deliberate. This is ‘method’ writing; the book is in character. Again in Dolz’s words: "I had never thought anyone else's thoughts before, never wondered what another person might be thinking… it's not my style, I lack imagination, I don't have that kind of mind".

Whilst one admires the author’s craft, it makes for slow and heavy going.

And Dolz is not the only character with this narrative disability. Surely it is the author’s joke that Dolz cannot see herself in her descriptions of her lover Javier Diaz-Varela - "he had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress", only sometimes able to stop himself making “digressions of his digressions”, and with a “natural tendency… to speechify”; or in the Perfect Couple’s survivor - "Do you understand what I mean? she added, realising that what she was saying was pretty abstruse".

Dolz works in publishing and has observed these traits of discourse and digression in “many of the writers I meet at the publishing house, as if it weren't enough for them to fill pages and pages with their thoughts and stories, which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic". Indeed this book is perhaps at its best when the author (who is also a publisher) is providing his playful – and self-referential - insights into his and Dolz’s professional world - "the idiotic world of publishing" and "horrible authors", where "writers are, for the most part, strange individuals. They get up in exactly the same state of mind is when they went to bed, thinking about their imaginary things, which despite being purely imaginary, take up most of their time". Dolz reserves particular scorn for the "few madmen [who] still continue to use typewriters" instead of computers, whilst the jacket photograph has the author sat behind a typewriter.

However, this makes it the more jarring when the repeatedly referenced Balzac story ‘Le Colonel Charbert’ is confused with the similar but pertinently different story of Martin Guerre ("They've even made three films of it"). Whilst the author’s method writing might permit excuse of such an error as being that of Diaz-Varela, this would not explain why Dolz – who in due courses publishes a new edition of Charbert – does not correct the error.

The weft is shot through with many dazzling observations: on the absurdity of human relationships that have run their course – "husbands or wives who daren’t or don't know how to leave their partner or who feel that they couldn't possibly inflict such pain on them: they secretly want the other person to die, preferring their deaths to having to confront the problem and find some sensible solution. It's absurd… they don't want to feel responsible for someone else's unhappiness, not even for the unhappiness of the person whose mere existence by their side is a torment to them"; on life - "what sense does it make that each person should have to experience more or less the same griefs and make more or less the same discoveries, and so on for eternity?"; on death - "The dead only have the energy that the living give them".

But there are not enough such apercu - and one too many that are seemingly misconceived – to lighten the cumbersomeness of the narrative style.

In the end the aspiration described by Diaz-Varela - that “once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance, and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novels imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with" – whilst justifying the slightness of the murder plot is defeated by the attenuation Dolz herself describes - "when you don't know what to believe, when you're not prepared to play the amateur detective, and you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess – which comes to the same thing."

Overall a good story line, although a little too slow paced for my liking. I found myself drifting through 3-4 chapters without having really read them and nothing of significance or interest happened.
The 'crime' essence of the book lacks many of the twists and turns that keep the reader interested and sadly ends up being rather predictable.

“The Infatuations” by Spanish writer Javier Marias gives a twist to the traditional murder story. It opens with the first of the many infatuations examined throughout the novel; Maria has become mesmerised by ‘the Perfect Couple’ who she sees every morning while having her breakfast at a local café. Observing them from a distance, she imagines a life for them and this fantasy helps her cope with her dispiriting job with a publishing company. Suddenly, the couple stop breakfasting at the café and Maria feels strangely abandoned. It is a few weeks later when she discovers that the husband was murdered within minutes of her last sight of him. When the widow returns to the café one day, Maria approaches her to offer her condolences. Thus begins a relationship which provides Maria with a further fascination, and she discovers another’s infatuation may be responsible for murder.
If you can find your way through the frustrating verbosity of this book, you will find a really interesting dark thriller. The ‘who/why/how-dunnit’ is an intriguing tale. However, the author’s fondness for long rambling paragraphs, with several ideas in the same sentence, is confusing and annoying. At several points during the book the characters try to analyse their own feelings or consider those of others. Rather than fully engaging the reader during these interludes, so that they can empathise with the characters, the style of writing instead alienates the reader as it is so unwieldy and difficult to read, with paragraphs often lasting up to two pages. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, though I suspect the former. It is as though Marias is unable to focus on the plot, and gets distracted by his own thoughts. The author also gives the impression of having real disdain for his peers and has projected this onto his main protagonist; illustrated by Maria’s scorn for and irritation with the writers she has to deal with.
At the heart of this book is a real ‘Hitchcockian’ thriller and therefore it should be a real page turner. However, it is ultimately rendered impotent by the author’s inability to cut to the chase. There may be a genre for this style of writing, but the tense thriller is not it.

The book leads the reader through emotions of death, loneliness and love. In the early stages it lacks pace
due to the author's description of multiple thought processes and limited factual content. However it gathers pace leading to an unexpected and thought provoking end.
I would recommend it to readers who want an psychological crime novel.

Maria has breakfast every morning in a café where a married couple also has theirs at the same time. She calls them "the perfect couple". Maria likes to see how they look at each other, their gestures, their proximity, how comfortable they are with each other, how they communicate and behave together and ultimately how much they seem to love each other. This hobby of Maria becomes an obsession and emotionally she needs them to make her day complete.

One day the couple stop going to the café and later Maria discovers that the husband has been murdered. This intensifies her fixation with them, so in order to know more about their lives she decides to approach the woman when she returns one day to the café. From that moment on Maria’s life is intertwined with Luisa’s and Javier’s, the dead husband's best friend.

This is a great novel-essay which is very thoughtful and profound about the complexity of human relationships. The death or murder of Deverne, the husband, is a vehicle for exploring detailed reflections on existential questions about life, death, love and morality among others. It also focusses on the sense we have of justice, impunity of our actions and how to justify guilt to oneself and to others.

Javier Marias is a great connoisseur of thought and human emotions which he describes with incredible accuracy, transparency and precision; starting with loss, pain, grief, bewilderment and adaptation of families to the absence of a loved one; how the children live the loss of a father or how the wife copes with it. This is the same loss but nevertheless lived in a very different way. What are the effects, consequences and aftermath of a disaster; how a violent or unnatural death wipes out in a split second the whole life of a person who will be remembered and talked about only for the instant of his death. He continues with infatuation: the noun, the concept, the adjective and the emotional state. It is generally regarded as something positive that can justify almost anything from the noblest actions to the worst villainy. Finally, he presents the fear of death and physical deterioration. In addition, throughout the entire novel the author convinces us of the impossibility of being completely sure of anything, even our own feelings.

All the action can be condensed into a few pages, but it is not the action what matters rather it is the mental discourse between characters which takes up most of the story. There is no suspense, but that is the intention of this work in which the language is more important than the plot. For this, the author uses a personal style that runs away from the main narrative to give a description later returning to the starting point. It is impressive the close and intimate approach that is used to describe the motivations of their actions. What are the limits that we choose for ourselves towards getting what we want?

Personally I have loved reading this book, although it was not an easy read. Since you must dedicate time to read it to be able to appreciate it and enjoy it, I would only recommend it to patient readers who like to think about what they read.

“The infatuations” is a thought provoking novel that does not leave you indifferent and stays with you once finished.

This is María's story about a couple she sees most days having breakfast in a café near her workplace. She is fascinated by them as they appear so happy and loving. Then the man is murdered and Maria gets drawn into the world of the woman, Luisa, and, particulary, the couple's friend, Javier Díaz-Varela.

María and Javier have a secret relationship for a while. This ends when María discovers more information about the murder which leaves her with a dilemma. Should she stay quiet or should she tell someone what she knows?

The writing is beautiful and María's thoughts are described naturally and believably. This does, however, often lead to thoughts rambling on for quite a while. I'm sure I counted one paragraph as carrying on for eight pages!

I didn't find it to be a fast read but I've found since I've finished it that it lingers in the memory. It's haunted me and I can't shake it off.

Javier Marias is a successful and well regarded Spanish writer, tipped as a future Nobel winner. I have not read any of his previous books, so came to him as a new reader.
"The Infatuations" is narrated by Maria and tells of her involvement with "The Perfect Couple" as she mentally names them, whom she observes as regulars at her own favourite cafe, and their friend, Javier.
Is it significant that the two main characters almost share the author's name? I think perhaps it is intended to be, but little is entirely clear in this book!! Maria proves a difficult and obsessive narrator; she speculates at length and in great detail about the other characters, imagining whole conversations and scenarios and presenting them as events that have definitely happened. This is done in paragraphs several pages long, punctuated only by full stops and commas, which becomes rather relentless as the book proceeds; by around page 80 I was starting to feel it was all too much, but the author cleverly hooks attention right back in with intriguing information, casually dropped in at the beginning of the second section of the book some 20 pages later (no, don't peep!!). Although, the book continues with further lengthy imaginings and reports of detailed discourses provided by Maria, there is now more action (and even the occasional semi-colon!).
Death, and more specifically murder, emerges as a major theme, but this is no conventional whodunnit. Instead, the author, starting from the death which has occurred in the book and ranging through Macbeth, Dumas' Three Musketeers and a Balzac novella "Colonel Chabert", considers the nature of death and its effects on those left behind. This is a book of ideas rather than characterisation or plot, although there is sufficient narrative arc to keep this reader engaged with "what is going to happen?" as well as interest in the ideas discussed. Speaking of Balzac's novella through Javier, the author states:
"What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us..." It seems to me that this is the author's aim here; speaking through his near namesakes, Maria and Javier, he presents us with ideas as to the nature of love and death and the effects of obsession, leaving us thinking more about these than caring too much about the (not very likeable) characters themselves. Although there is some sort of resolution of the plot, this is not a book you read for the story, but to be stimulated to think on the themes raised. It is not an easy read, but I found it became more compelling as I read on and I enjoyed the way it provoked thought, so that it was ultimately worth the effort it required.

The Infatuations is a wonderfully written book. Maria, the narrator of this story is infatuated by a couple she watches every morning in the café she frequents. Desvern, one half of the couple, is found murdered and Maria finds herself drawn into their lives and the mystery of what looks like a random violent attack.
The story develops amongst beautifully written and thought provoking chapters and explores many areas of both human ability and vulnerability by discussing relationships, mortality and unrequited love. Maria finds herself caught up in the dark web spun by her new acquaintances and despite her own interests and given what she knows, has to explore the consequences of any decisions or action she takes.
Full of beautiful paragraphs this is an intriguing novel that I thoroughly enjoyed and I will definitely keep an eye out for other books by this author.