The Infatuations
*Starred Review* Marías  has earned major literary prizes in his native Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Chile, and Ireland. A novelist’s novelist, a consummate stylist, his works have been translated into 42 languages. The plot of The Infatuations has elements of a thriller. The narrator, María Dolz, eavesdrops on a conversation that undoes all she thinks she knows about Javier, her lover, and his dear friend, the victim of an apparently brutal and senseless murder. What she believed was a tragedy may be the result of a conspiracy. When Javier speaks of Balzac, María thinks of her father’s favorite, Dumas père,  and quotes from Macbeth appear; yet these postmodern tropes are never more alive than in Marías’ respectful hands. The cadences of his exquisite sentences are preserved in translator Costa’s English, the clauses balanced like a loaded scale; detail accumulates yet also erodes and turns elusive. The more precise the descriptions of passion and reflection, the more fleeting these states appear: the object of our attention and its dark shadow vie for supremacy. It is magical, stupendous, and not done for effect. Marías dramatizes the fluidity of attention as María persuades herself, and us, of the truth and of its opposite. --Michael Autrey