PositivePaste MagazineThe Infatuations takes you where very few novels do…to dark thoughts and long passages of suggested theories or, at times, even to entirely imagined conversations between characters. Plot advancement takes a back seat. Instead, a narrator’s thoughts offer various perspectives on life, death and love…and, appropriately, infatuation ... The Infatuations sometimes overlooks the actual story to instead highlight how Marías presents his story ... Marías obviously and absolutely revels in taking a single idea or thought, then riffing, building on it, sometimes for paragraphs, even pages, at a time. One sentence runs a page and a half. At times, multiple pages pass with no action or event, instead centering on the narrator’s inner reflections ... The discussion and analysis of death’s after-effects remain more vital to the novel than the events surrounding Miguel’s death ... The style cannot entirely escape criticism. For some, even an appreciation for introspective searching cannot mask a burning desire to know what happens next in a snail-paced plot ... Still, Marías forces us at every turn to question the source of words, to remember and separate facts from suspicions.
