The Infatuations
Javier Marias (Margaret Jull Costa, trans.), 2013
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307950734
Summary
From the award-winning Spanish writer Javier Marias comes an extraordinary new book that has been a literary sensation around the world: an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder that we come to understand—or do we?—through one woman’s ever-unfurling imagination and infatuations.
At the Madrid cafe where she stops for breakfast each day before work, Maria Dolz finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Though she can hardly explain it, observing what she imagines to be their “unblemished” life lifts her out of the doldrums of her own existence.
But what begins as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement when the man is fatally stabbed in the street. Maria approaches the widow to offer her condolences, and at the couple’s home she meets—and falls in love with—another man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime.
As Maria recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly reimagined as metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, guilt and obsession, chance and coincidence, how we are haunted by our losses, and above all, the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September, 20, 1951
• Where—Madrid, Spain
• Education—University of Madrid
• Awards—International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Prix
Femina Etranger; Romulo Gallegos Prize (Venezuela); Prix
Formentor
• Currently—lives in Madrid, Spain
Javier Marias is a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist. The recipient of numerous prizes, he has written thirteen novels, three story collections, and nineteen works of collected articles and essays. His books have been translated into forty-three languages, in fifty-two countries, and have sold more than seven million copies throughout the world.
Marías was born in Madrid. His father was the philosopher Julian Marias, 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. Marias's first literary employment consisted in translating Dracula scripts for his maternal uncle, Jesus Franco. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.
Writing
Marias 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, The Dominions of the Wolf (1971) at age 17, after running away to Paris. His second novel, Voyage Along the Horizon (1973), was an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica.
After attending the Complutense University of Madrid, Marias turned his attention to translating English novels into Spanish. His translations included work by Updike, Hardy, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Kipling, James, Stevenson, Browne, and Shakespeare. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Between 1983 and 1985 he lectured in Spanish literature and translation at the University of Oxford.
In 1986 Marias published The Man of Feeling and, in 1989, All Souls, which was set at Oxford University. The Spanish film director Gracia Querejeta released El Último viaje de Robert Rylands, adapted from All Souls, in 1996.
His 1992 novel A Heart So White was a commercial and critical success, with Marias and Margaret Jull Costa (the translator) becoming joint winners of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1994 novel, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize.
The protagonists of the novels written since 1986 are all interpreters or translators of one kind or another, based on his own experience as a translator and teacher of translation at Oxford University. Of these protagonists, Marías has written, "They are people who are renouncing their own voices."
In 2002 Marías published Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first part of a trilogy that is his most ambitious literary project. The first volume is dominated by a translator, an elderly don based on an actual professor emeritus of Spanish studies at Oxford University, Sir Peter Russell. The second volume, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream, was published in 2004. In 2007, Marias the completed the final installment, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.
Marias operates a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also writes a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column "La Zona Fantasma" is published in the monthly magazine The Believer.
Marias was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 2006. At his investiture in 2008 he agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson that the work of novelists is "pretty childish," but also argued that it is impossible to narrate real events, and that “you can only fully tell stories about what has never happened, the invented and imagined.” (Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher. Retrieved 11/01/2013.)
Book Reviews
For established fans, The Infatuations will be another welcome shipment of Marias; for new readers it is as good a place to start as any. Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author's company. In Javier Marias's case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.
Edward St. Aubyn - New York Times Book Review
Mysterious and seductive; it’s got deception, it’s got love affairs, it’s got murder—the book is the most sheerly addictive thing Marias has ever written . . . Marias is a star writer in Europe, where his best-sellers collect prizes the way Kardashians collect paparazzi. He’s been hailed in America, too, yet he’s never broken through like Haruki Murakami or Roberto Bolaño. This should change with his new novel, The Infatuations, which is the ideal introduction to his work.
Fresh Air/NPR
The work of a master in his prime, this is a murder story that becomes an enthralling vehicle for all the big questions about life, love, fate, and death.
Guardian (UK)
A haunting masterpiece.... The lasting challenge to literature is to achieve a satisfying marriage between high art and the low drives of a simple plot. The Infatuations is just such a novel . . . Just as Macbeth is a thriller that’s also a great tragedy, The Infatuations is a murder story that’s also a profound story of fatal obsession.... Don Quixote was first published as long ago as 1620. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Infatuations soon acquired an equally devoted following.
Observer (UK)
Extraordinary.... Marias has defined the ethos of our time.
Alberto Manguel - Guardian (UK)
Absorbing and unnerving.... A labyrinthine exploration, at once thrilling and melancholy, of the meanings of one man’s death—and a vivid testimony to the power of stories, for good or ill, to weave the world into our thoughts and our thoughts into the world.
London Sunday Times
Marias shows that death is hardest on those left living.... With philosophical rigor, Marias uses the page-turning twists of crime fiction to interrogate the weighty concepts of grief, culpability, and mortality.... The novel’s power lies in its melding of readable momentum and existential depth...[as well as] clarity and digressive uncertainty; a novel that further secures Marias’s position as one of contemporary fiction’s most relevant voices.
Publishers Weekly
Marias turns a narrative about an apparently random homicide into a metaphysical inquiry fraught with ambiguity as accounts of the incident vary in their degree of accuracy and detail, a plot twist presents a questionable motive, and even the victim's name isn't certain.... [Maria's] fluid yet digressive style may not be to everyone's liking. When it comes to a novel exquisitely questioning the nature of fact and truth, however, this is a highly rewarding literary experience. —Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Library Journal
An apparently random street murder sparks musings on shades of guilt and the mutability of truth.... As always with Marías, there are no definitive answers, only the exploration of provocative ideas in his trademark style: long, looping sentences... that mimic the stuttering starts and stops of a restless mind.... Marias' rare gift is his ability to make this intellectual jousting as suspenseful as the chase scenes in a commercial thriller. He's tremendously stimulating to read.... Blindingly intelligent, engagingly accessible—it seems there's nothing Marías can't make fiction do.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Over the period of a few years, Maria has spent part of every morning watching a married man and woman in a neighborhood café. She is drawn to them because of their seeming happiness, “as if they provided me with a vision of an orderly or...harmonious world” (4). Is this a strange thing to do? What does it reveal about Maria?
2. The “Perfect Couple,” as Maria calls Miguel and Luisa, is abruptly severed when a homeless man stabs Miguel to death in a seemingly unmotivated attack. When Maria learns that Miguel was killed on the same day she last saw him, she realizes that “his wife and I had said goodbye to him at the same time, she with her lips and I with my eyes only” (30). What do you think of Maria’s reaction to the murder? Is Maria in love with Miguel?
3. When Maria visits Luisa, both speculate on what Miguel might have been thinking as he was being stabbed and as he lay dying (50-51). Maria’s projection of Miguel’s state of mind proceeds in single sentence of more than two pages in length (52-54). What role does the imagination—especially imagining the thoughts or experiences of others—play in this novel? Why do you think the novel is occupied with questions about different possible paths and outcomes?
4. Luisa tells Maria that Miguel’s death has changed her way of thinking: “It’s as though I’ve become a different person since then...with an unfamiliar, alien mentality, someone given to making strange connections and being frightened by them” (49). She now hears a siren and is overcome with dread, not knowing who might be ill or wounded or dying. Has her husband’s death made Luisa think more like a novelist?
5. Maria imagines that in thinking of the bizarre misfortune of being attacked by a stranger, Miguel might have thought of Maria herself as one of a number of people “who are merely vague extras or marginal presences, who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting and whom we don’t even miss if they disappear” (53). If Maria, as our narrator, is such a vague extra or marginal presence, do her first-person narration and her presence as a central character in the story dispel the notion of her obscurity?
6. Luisa says she would feel better if someone had plotted against her husband. She has looked up the word envidia—envy—and reads a part of the dictionary entry to Maria: “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies” (61). Luisa later introduces Javier to Maria as “one of Miguel’s best friends” (59). Do you have suspicions of Javier at this point, or only later?
7. The second time Maria meets Javier they are in Madrid’s Natural History Museum, where dead animals preserved in the attitudes of life stare out of their cases. Why is this unusual setting relevant to Javier’s view that the grieving Luisa is holding on to “the image of Miguel, (106)” but that she will eventually assign him “a place in time, both him and his character frozen for ever” (107)? Do you agree with Javier that “the only people who do not fail or let us down are those who are snatched from us”?
8. Maria becomes sexually involved with Javier, and is drawn more deeply into the intrigue surrounding Miguel’s death. Look at the description of Javier on pages 85-86 and discuss what is appealing or provocative about him. How would you characterize Maria’s feelings toward Javier (117-121)? Is she obsessed? In love? Infatuated?
9. After Miguel’s death, Maria expresses the idea that the moment of death changes the identity of the person who dies. Javier is convinced that it’s only a matter of time until Luisa realizes that her husband is gone forever. How does Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert demonstrate Javier’s view that something fixed and permanent divides the living and the dead—even if, as in Colonel Chabert’s case, the dead return to life (131-140)?
10. One night, some time after she and Javier have become lovers, Maria says, “I found myself wishing or, rather, fantasizing about the possibility that Luisa might die and thus leave the field open for me with Díaz-Varela, since she was doing nothing to occupy that field herself (147). I, for example, could launch an offensive against Luisa behind her back, one so oblique that she wouldn’t be aware of it because she wouldn’t even know that an enemy was stalking her” (151). The novel implies that all human beings are capable of fantasizing about the deaths of people who stand in their way. Do you believe this is true? Is it easy to understand or identify with these thoughts?
11. Maria is the first female narrator in a Marias novel. In an interview in The Paris Review, Marias noted that his female characters were “always seen through the eyes of a male.” In a scene in which Maria and Ruiberriz are talking, Maria has to decide whether she will emerge from the bedroom wearing only her skirt (166-175). Why are her thoughts about her body and her sexuality important in this scene and elsewhere? Why is it effective that the narrator in this novel is a woman?
12. Midway through the novel, Javier’s secret emerges when Maria overhears him talking to Ruiberriz, who was his intermediary with the homeless man who killed Miguel. Her reaction to this new knowledge is complex. Does she now think of Javier as a murderer, or does she think that Javier set up a chain of events that might well not have resulted in Miguel’s death, so he is not a murderer (176-194)?
13. Marias has said that literature is the “filter” through which he thinks and writes: “What I present to the reader comes from my experience and from what I have invented, but it has all been filtered by literature. That is what matters: the filter” (Paris Review interview). Discuss how the line “She should have died hereafter,” from Macbeth and the quote “Yes, a murder, nothing more” from The Three Musketeers, focus the philosophical concerns of the novel (See 107-116, 218-219, 229-230
14. What elements does The Infatuations share with mystery or detective fiction? How is it not at all like those genres? What do you make of the long discursive digressions? Are they always relevant to the larger questions and investigations of the novel?
15. Javier tells Maria, when she asks “what happened” to Colonel Chabert: “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 and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention” (227). Discuss this important statement in terms of your experience of this novel.
16. The entire story is transmitted through the perspective of Maria. Does this call into question her authority or her reliability? What is the effect of being inside a single consciousness throughout the novel? To what degree can the story be read as the projection onto a fictional world of the activity of a novelist’s mind, Maria standing in for Marias?
17. Miguel knew, says Javier, “that the fact we are here at all is entirely thanks to an improbable coming-together of various chance events, and when that coming-together ceases, we cannot really complain.... No one can complain about not having been born or not having been in the world before or not having always been in the world, so why should anyone complain about dying or not being in the world hereafter or not remaining in it forever?” (283). How does Miguel’s philosophy about the contingent nature of human life resonate through the whole novel? Is it an appealing perspective on life and death?
18. Once Javier agreed to do Miguel the favor of arranging his death, he says, “My mind had to start working and plotting like the mind of a criminal” (292). Does his explanation of the circumstances make Javier, in the mind of Maria, any less a murderer? Does she even believe that Miguel was ill? Discuss her statement “Everything that has been said to us resonates and lingers” (295).
19. When Maria sees Javier and Luisa in a restaurant, apparently now married, the novel comes full circle (326-331). She recalls the statement of the lawyer Derville in Colonel Chabert: “Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded” (334). What do you think about the resolution of the plot, and Maria’s sense of the story’s ending?
(Questions issued by publisher.)