RaveThe Los Angeles TimesAsymmetrical love affairs, sudden (often violent) death, the wobbly nature of identity and the curious link between the fictions we read (or write) and the shaky narratives we fabricate from our own lives are the recurrent fixations of this witty, urbane and acutely perceptive writer. Superficially, The Infatuations is a romantic fable inside a crime story, focused on a thirtysomething Madrid single, Maria, who may be a namesake for the author ... Through interlacing internal monologues, the novel switches seamlessly between the minimal action that occurs, which may or may not jibe with its characters’ fantasies, projections and rationalizations about what occurs ... Dialogue and plot frequently pause for paragraphs, even pages, to make way for the characters’ inner soliloquies ... Masquerading as melodrama, “The Infatuations” gradually unmasks itself as a philosophical crime-scene investigation, in which Marías’ scalpel-like prose and microscopic observations lay bare the fragmented, indeterminate nature not only of our most intimate relationships but of everything we think we know about why we behave as we do.