Award-winning author Javier Marias examines a household living in the unhappy shadow of history, & explores the cruel, tender punishments we exact on those we love As a young man, Juan de Vere takes a job that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Eduardo Muriel is a famous film director
- urbane, discreet, irreproachable
- an irresistible idol to a young man. Muriel`s wife Beatriz is a soft, ripe woman who slips through her husband`s home like an unwanted ghost, finding solace in other beds. & on the periphery of all their lives stands Dr Jorge Van Vechten, a shadowy family friend implicated in unsavoury rumours that Muriel cannot bear to pursue himself
- rumours he asks Juan to investigate instead. But as Juan draws closer to the truth, he uncovers more questions, ones his employer has not asked & would rather not answer. Why does Muriel hate Beatriz? How did Beatriz meet Van Vechten? & what happened during the war? As Juan learns more about his employers, he begins to understand the conflicting pulls of desire, power & guilt that govern their lives
- & his own. Marias presents a study of the infinitely permeable boundaries between private & public selves, between observer & participant, between the deceptions we suffer from others & those we enact upon ourselves. ` No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this` Daily Telegraph on The Infatuations