Infatuations
It is a painfully smug habit to begin a review by referring to other books you have read by the same author. In my case these are All Souls (1989); A Heart so White (1992) and Dark Back of Time (1998). All Souls involves a Spanish academic and an affair, and is – according to Penguin Books – ‘a masterpiece of black humour’. A Heart so White involves an investigation into the past of the narrator’s father, with echoes of Macbeth. A Dark Back in Time is so strange that it is it attracts reviews with words like ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dazzling’ – a sure sign that no one can make head nor tail of what Javier Marías had in mind when he wrote a book with a character named Javier Marías recalling the sources of his earlier writing. The Infatuations , I am relieved to say keeps its digressions and literary allusions under tight discipline, paradoxically through sentences that can only be described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dazzling’. This novel is difficult to describe without giving away