‘The Infatuations’, by Javier Marías – review

A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed to death in the street — an apparently senseless crime.

The tragedy of the happy couple touches and disturbs her. Then, almost accidentally, she finds herself becoming involved with the widow and the dead man’s best friend. At first all is straightforward: loss, grieving, consolation. Gradually the relationship becomes more complex: she begins an affair with the friend, recognising that she is little more than a stopgap in his life. And so things continue, until, at a certain point a remark overheard, an ominous hint, sets up unease and leaves her floundering. Nothing is quite as it seems — but how could it be? We’re in Javier Marías territory. This is a novelist who doesn’t deal in the straightforward; his narratives are serpentine, his vocabulary one of ambiguity, his landscape a place of shadows.

The Infatuations is a metaphysical exploration masquerading as a murder mystery. The narrator, the widow and the best friend spend much of the book engaged in conversation, or imagined conversation, or recollected conversation, living simultaneously in a past both real and fantasy, tinged with nostalgia and regret, and a future imbued with suspicion and impossible hopes. The truth is slippery. There is action: but the killing will have taken place in the past, as will the love-making. Head-clutching stuff, but quietly addictive.

Marías is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: his ostensible subjects look seductively mainstream: his 1,600-page trilogy Your Face Tomorrow reads like Proust re-imagined by Le Carré — spying, adultery, betrayal, sex and violence.