Infatuations, The

Description:

The Infatuations is a critically acclaimed novel by the great Spanish writer Javier Marias.

Every day, Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same cafe. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren't there, and she feels obscurely bereft.

It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the cafe with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death.

With The Infatuations, Javier Marias brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love and morality.

Praise for The Infatuations:

'Mesmerising . . . chillingly clear and hypnotically eerie . . . At this very fine and disturbing novel's core is a compelling meditation on love in all its ramifications' Herald

'Keeps us guessing until almost the last page' Financial Times

'Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust' Guardian

Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marias, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramon del Valle-Inclan.

Review: Mesmerising . . . At this very fine and disturbing novel's core is a compelling meditation on love in all its ramifications * Herald *
The real pleasure is in the strange things his narrators do to the business of narration. Marias has discovered a unique form -- Adam Thirlwell * TLS *
Plotted with tremendous skill and elegance, this cerebral tale is entirely absorbing * Daily Mail *
The classical themes of love, death and fate are explored with elegant intelligence by Marias in what is perhaps his best novel so far' -- Alberto Manguel * Guardian *
Marias at his most haunting * Financial Times *
No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this -- Tim Martin * Daily Telegraph *
Absorbing and unnerving . . . powered by the pressure of good old-fashioned suspense * Sunday Times *
A murder mystery that's also a brilliant meditation on life, love and death -- Robert McCrum * Observer *

Author Biography: Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951 and died in 2022. He published fifteen novels, three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marias, Jose Saramago and Eca de Queiroz, and poets: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mario de Sa-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa and Ana Luisa Amaral. Her work has brought her numerous prizes, among them, the 2018 Premio Valle-Inclan for On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes. In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.