How fragile they are, these connections with people one knows only by sight.
[usr 3.5]
Before I proceed to laud the genius of Javier Marias. I will take time to explain you the exact feeling am experiencing now that I am finally through it. It may not be in its wholeness but I could make do with comparisons.
The infatuations or Los enamoramientos, although I wonder why infatuations and not the literal ‘crushes’, but the more I read it the better I comprehended and came to decide that infatuations was good enough. Each page of this book is a like music sheet and then there are some glorious sentences which thrums the deepest chord your heart like a cello. You read something, and you re-read it just to experience that feeling of the unmistakable association. You’d come to believe that he must have torn a page out of all the journals unrequited love generally leads to and compiled it in a book. So when each page came back down you couldn’t succumbing to the force of colligation.
I can’t help but put a few excerpts
…then I realized that I was bleeding profusely and was going to die even though I wasn’t ready to and even though I’d done nothing to deserve it. Let me through, I beg you, you can’t be in anywhere near as much of a hurry as me, and if there is a chance I can be saved, I have to get to the hospital quickly. Today’s my birthday, and my wife has no idea what’s happened, she’s sitting in a restaurant waiting to celebrate, she’s probably bought me a gift, a surprise, don’t let her find me dead…
...When we get caught in the spider’s web, we fantasize endlessly and, at the same time, make do with the tiniest crumb, with hearing him, smelling him,glimpsing him, sensing his presence, knowing that he is still on our horizon, from which he has not entirely vanished, and that we cannot yet see, in the distance, the dust from his fleeing feet.
He slices each aspect of love and all the possible variations of the grand equation with a cold steely scalpel with utmost care. He lines up his character like a series of dominos and sets in motion a toppling chain that renders you fumbling for words to produce in the honor of this piece of sheer brilliancy.
