PositiveSlateMarías takes slightly trashy, eye-catching plots, then winds long, philosophical digressions around them like so many knotty, twisty pieces of string. These digressions consist of what Marías calls pensamiento literario, \'literary thinking,\' which is different from philosophical thinking because it \'allows you to contradict yourself\' ... How do we really feel about the dead, after they’re gone? Is murder truly always as revolting to us as it seems in the abstract? The characters in The Infatuations think about these questions through the works of old masters ... All Marías books feel like chapters in one much longer book. And it’s one you should start reading, if you haven’t already.
Sheila Heti
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewShe speaks with that questing and ingenuous tone throughout the book, but neither the novel nor its heroine is precious or naïve. Sheila has an intense, sporadic and submissive sexual affair with an artist named Israel ... Sheila herself can be fairly ridiculous, but not in the manner typical of a comic novel’s bumbling protagonist. Her occasional delusions of grandeur are familiar, perhaps ... But her far more egregious and unusual failing is her utter susceptibility to the ideas and desires of others ... More broadly, though, the novel shares with much reality television a kind of episodic aimlessness, and a focus on young, self-involved characters who spend a lot of time thinking about how they look to other people ... Heti sees the silliness in the desire for fame that drives such fare, but she also knows that same desire is involved in the impulse to make art ... I do not think this novel knows everything, but Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of.
