Infatuations

Product Description

The Infatuations" is a metaphysical murder mystery & a stunningly original literary achievement by Javier Marias the internationally acclaimed author of "A Heart So White" & " Your Face Tomorrow". Every day Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same cafe. & every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren't there & she feels obscurely bereft. It is only later when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man lying stabbed in the street his shirt half off that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards when the woman returns to the cafe with her children who are then collected by a different man & Maria approaches her to offer her condolences an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random pointless death. With " The Infatuations" Javier Marias brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry addressing existential questions of life death love & morality. " The Infatuations" is an extraordinary immersive book about the terrible force of events & their consequences. "I am greatly impressed by the quality of Marias' writing.. .he uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species the human being". (W. G. Sebald). " Years ago I said that Marias was Spain's best living writer... Nothing afterwards has made me alter that opinion". (Eduardo Mendoza " El Pais"). "[I am] enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories lost experiences & real-life fantasies". (Marina Warner " Guardian"). " Stylish cerebral... Marias is a startling talent". (" The New York Times"). " Sentence by glorious sentence is there a better novelist alive in Europe now than Javier Marias?". (" Independent") Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels two collections of short stories & several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages & won a dazzling array of international literary awards including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for "A Heart So White". He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors including Joseph Conrad Robert Louis Stevenson Sir Thomas Browne & Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain the United States & in Britain as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years & has translated many novels & short stories by Portuguese Spanish & Latin American writers including Javier Marias Fernando Pessoa Jose Saramago Bernardo Atxaga & Ramon del Valle-Inclan. She has won various prizes for her work including in 2008 the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award & the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eca de Queiroz's masterpiece " The Maias" & most recently the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for " The Elephant's Journey" by Jose Saramago."