The Infatuations (2013)
Javier Marías (1951)
(translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
346 pages
“…it’s so easy to introduce doubt into someone’s mind.”This reflection comes in the final pages of Javier Marías’ novel The Infatuations, but captures a notion that runs through the story: we cannot know the whole truth of an event, and so can easily be swayed to question what we think we know about it. Moreover, each new explanation we receive can often, instead of increasing our understanding, leave us only more uncertain.
The Infatuations takes place in Madrid, where María Dolz works at a publishing firm. María narrates the story, and opens by recalling a couple who she has seen for several years in a café at which she stops each morning before going to work. Despite never having approached or spoken with them, she has developed an attraction to the couple --- finding the husband handsome and the wife pretty, and the two apparently very much in love with one another. At times she sees their kids join them, before the father drives them off to school, and she begins to imagine the couple’s seemingly happy life together. Struggling at work with the various literary oddballs her firm publishes, she finds that these few minutes she vicariously spends with her ‘Perfect Couple’ each morning make her workday more bearable.At one point the couple don’t show up for a few weeks she quickly begins to miss them, hoping they will come back soon to brighten her mornings. When weeks stretch into months she begins to wonder what has happened, fearing that their lives have taken on a different daily routine or that they have moved elsewhere. What she finally discovers is much more shocking: the husband was killed in a seemingly random act of violence by a street person in one of the better neighborhoods of Madrid. Some months later she sees the wife again at the café, somber and distracted, sitting either alone or sometimes with a male friend who ends up driving her kids off to school. Awkwardly, as they had never spoken before, María approaches the woman one day in the café to introduce herself and offer her condolences, only to learn that the woman and her husband had actually also noticed her, and had had a nickname for her: “The Prudent Young Woman.” What begins as a brief meeting to offer her sympathy ends up involving María in the mystery of the man’s murder; though the truth of the event must exist, she struggles to turn what she learns into a coherent explanation, as she finds herself mixing together her incomplete information with her assumptions about people’s motivations and rationalizations, including her own. We the reader are left in the same position, reliant as we are on María as our narrator.
By not providing us with “the truth,” by allowing us only into the thoughts of one character in the story, Marías leads us into a situation we encounter regularly in our every day lives: striving to make sense of what happens around us without having all the facts, never quite knowing whether we can fully believe what others tell us, wondering about their motivations and our own biases. We know that we ourselves rationalize, that we ourselves block out unpleasant or uncomfortable facts from our own thoughts, so we cannot help but realize that others do this too.
The actual physical action in the story could probably be boiled down into a few dozen pages at most. The real drama here, aside from the slowly revealed back story behind the murder, lies not in the physical action, but in María’s thoughts as she tries to interpret what she sees and hears, to make a plausible story out of it to satisfy her curiosity. For pages at a time we follow her thoughts as she imagines first one logical sequence of events or inner motivation of another character based on what she has heard, and then suddenly adapts it as she sees a new reaction or hears a new explanation. And we readers too cannot help but also interpret what we “hear” and “see” even if it is through María, as we try to divine for ourselves what has happened.
Woven into the plot --- as a kind of bonus that enhances the story and yet can also stand alone --- are Marías’ spot on revelations about our human condition. Some of these startle us to read because though we recognize immediately the fundamental truth, we find that we have never had it so precisely crystallized. Others, more pointedly, confront us with truths that had never occurred to us before, because, we are forced to realize, we have not allowed ourselves the honesty to actually think them consciously. Marías brings this wonderful engagement with his readers’ lives and thoughts to all of his novels that I have read, and it is in part this ability and technique that draws me so strongly to his work.
Take care if read you Marías’ novels: you may suddenly find the fog blown away from your fuzzy rationalizations and hazy motivations, and encounter realizations that challenge your thoughts and beliefs.
Read quotes from this and other books by Javier Marías
Other reviews / information:
Other works I have read by Marías, though I read all but one before I began this blog of reviews:
- While the Women are Sleeping: A collection of short stories.
- When I was Mortal: A collection of short stories.
- A Heart so White: A novel of a man who upon getting married reconsiders his past.
- Dark Back of Time: A novel written as a kind of imagined biography; a study of human nature that will pull you in deeply and force you to consider ideas and fears you had tried to leave buried in your subconscious.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION and NON-FICTION
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