Media Center: ‘Infatuations’ by Javier Marias

Media Center: ‘Infatuations’ by Javier Marias

WHO: Javier Marias

WHAT: THE INFATUATIONS, a novel

WHEN: Published by Knopf August 15, 2013

WHERE: Set in Madrid.

WHY: “Blindingly intelligent, engagingly accessible—it seems there is nothing Marias cannot make fiction do.” —KIRKUS, starred review

“A novelist’s novelist, a consumate stylist.
The cadences of Marias’ 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.”
—Michael Autrey, in a starred review for BOOKLIST

“One of contemporary fiction’s most relevant voices.
“Each morning María Dolz has breakfast at a cafe watching perfect couple Miguel and Luisa. One morning Miguel is stabbed to death on his birthday by a knife-wielding panhandler, a seemingly random act of madness. This rupture in María’s idyllic voyeurism causes her to intersect her life with Luisa’s, enmeshing herself in the murder’s aftermath. Yet, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that nothing is certain but death.
“With philosophical rigor, Marías uses the page-turning twists of crime fiction to interrogate the weighty concepts of grief, culpability, and mortality. Indeed, scattered throughout are metafictional reflections on the limits and power of literature’s hypotheticals, while María’s job at a publishing company provides comic relief in its Author photocaricatures of the vanities of writers. The novel’s power lies in its melding of readable momentum and existential depth.
“Through Costa’s lucid translation, the prose exhibits Marías’s trademark clarity and digressive uncertainty; a novel that further secures Marías’s position as one of contemporary fiction’s most relevant voices.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Media Resources:
About the book | About the author | Read an excerpt |  Download the jacket or the author photo | Listen to the Audiobook

Publicist for this title:
Michelle Somers | 212-572-2082 | msomers@randomhouse.com