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Gli Innamoramenti (2011)

by Javier Marías(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

8806210440 (ISBN13: 9788806210441)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Einaudi

review 1: Technically, I suppose you could call this a crime novel, but it's an odd one. There is a murder committed, but in the end the identity of the real murderer remains elusive as well as any motive for the killing. All that is certain is that there is a dead man. Doesn't this contradict the conventions of a crime novel?It does, but I think the author is just using the a crime novel format to philosophize, particularly on the nature of time. He has his narrator comment, "We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace." What happens in most crime stories is that we EXPECT an answer to an mystery and follow the process of arri... moreving at that answer with pleasure. But if a murder mystery could shift into another dimension, and still keep our interest, then we'd gladly continue reading.That what Javier has successfully managed. He reminds us that he is retelling a story by Balzac, COLONEL CHABERT, in which a solder is wounded during a Napoleonic battle and is mistakenly thought dead and thrown into a open pit of corpses. He is missing for a long period of time and his wife, after mourning his death, finally remarries and gets on with her life. But Chabert has not died; he almost miraculously survives and makes his way back home to see his wife. When he learns that she is happily remarried, that life has gone on without him, he is faced with a very painful choice. Why should he disrupt and demolish his wife's new happiness? What would be the point of revealing the truth at the expense of destroying peoples' lives who have adjusted to life without him?This is close to the same dilemma in which the first person narrator, a woman, in Javier's story finds herself. She hardly knew the dead man, he was just part of a happily married couple that she saw every morning in a shop where she was having her coffee. She learns by newspaper that he was brutally stabbed to death, by a madman who had mistaken him for someone else. One of those senseless tragedies of which the news is made up.An "accident" then, but in another accidental encounter she learns that this killing might not have been so randomly senseless as it at first seemed. But she has no proof, and talking to the police may well needlessly involve her, with the possibility of danger to herself. She does nothing, and the longer she waits, she begins to realize the "awful power of the present which crushes the past more easily as the past recedes, and falsifies it too without the past getting a chance to speak." Next she learns that what she thought was a murder may have been a kind of semi-planned suicide, so she has even more doubts about happened. Adding to this uncertainly, the parallel with Balzac's novel becomes clearer. The widow of the slain man in THE INFATUATIONS, after grieving, begins to rebuild her life and has a real second chance at being happy. Nothing is going to bring back her dead husband, so "who am I to disturb the universe?" the narrator asks herself. Obviously , not a crime story that has any resolution.Rather, as she puts it, "it forms part of the hazy universe of narratives with their blind spots and contradictions and obscurities and mistakes, all encircled by shadows and darkness . . ." I think it's a very good novel, one using the crime novel format to speculate about the the nature of time, how time affects and changes, even falsifies, our perceptions of ourselves and events. In the process even our notions of what is right and wrong begin to crumble.
review 2: Tedioso, aburrido. Me gustan Proust y Henry James, pero Javier Marías es insufrible. Otra vez yo necesitaba algo para leer en español y esta novela había recibido buenas reseñas. Es verdad que me gustaba Corazón tan blanco y otra de sus novelas anteriores, pero ésta fue la peor. Tiene una trama increíble además de una protagonista también increíble. El estilo no es el problema aquí, sino el concepto. less

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