los enamoramientos (the infatuations) [javier marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Marias is an author much in vogue. I had tried to read one of his previously, and hadn’t got on with it. I opted for The Infatuations as I read it was a novel about Madrid. Where I find myself at present. In truth, Madrid is but a marginal presence in the novel. True, the book is predicated around the act of going for breakfast, a regular Madrileño habit. Thereafter it feels as though it could occur in any capital city. Which in no way diminishes the book’s quality. The narrator, Maria, becomes mildly obsessed with a perfect couple she spies on over her breakfast coffee, whose happiness raises her spirits before she goes to work. When the husband is brutally murdered, she finds herself an unwitting confidant of the murderer. As this brief outline might reveal, there’s a fair amount of contrivance in the plot, something the erudite author plays on, as he riffs on Shakespeare and Balzac, among other references for unlikely death scenarios. The pleasure of the text is to be found in the way Marias teases out the thoughts and permutations of the unlikely scenario he has constructed. With an almost forensic or neurotic diligence, depending on your point of view, Maria explores every conceivable avenue that the book possesses. Marias clearly loves to write and he never seems to use one word where half a dozen would do. The effect is sometimes exasperating, but it also delivers nuggets of brilliance, as the writer sifts through the narrator’s stream of his consciousness.

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(It crossed my mind as I was returning to the city from the Casa del Campo, that one way in which this might be said to be a Madrileño novel is that the city’s perspective is sentinel. Madrid is perched on top of a steep hill, looking down towards the river and the plain. Marias’ perspective, and that of Maria, feels similar. The story is looked down on from on high, with every detail in the landscape inspected and surveilled. A forensic consciousness.)