Just yesterday Scott Esposito published his review of Personae in the Washington Post.  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/personae-by-sergio-de-la-pava/2013/12/10/900406fa-5d23-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

He really likes De La Pava and gives the book as glowing a review as possible.  He manages to describe more accurately than any other review I’ve seen exactly what all is in the book:  

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Like its predecessor, “Personae” begins with the investigation of a crime: Detective Helen Tame arrives at a Manhattan apartment where Antonio Arce, over a century old, has died. She eventually acquires Arce’s notebook, and in due time we read the impressionistic memoir at its heart, but only after meandering through excerpts from Tame’s scholarly paper on Bach and Glenn Gould, a short story about swimming out to sea, a two-act Beckettian play, Tame’s explanation of Arce’s death and two obituaries. The book’s final 50 pages — Arce’s memoir — take us from a suicide mission in the jungles of Colombia to a love story in New York City and feature some of the finest writing of De La Pava’s burgeoning career.

Split unevenly among Tame’s section, Arce’s section and an 83-page absurdist play, “Personae,” is united more by its themes than by any one narrative. The play is the strangest and most difficult part of this book. It involves several mental patients engaged in furious conversation. A gun is introduced in Act I and fired in Act II. There’s also a spearing, a gender change, a severed head and an eerie drumbeat that may herald disaster. In spite of all that, what looms largest is the play’s obsessively recursive dialogue, which opens with several pages of argumentation about what everyone’s name is.

This challenging play is balanced by the portrayal of Tame’s and Arce’s extraordinary minds. Tame, who begins playing the piano at age 5 and gives world-class performances at 20 before quitting to become a detective, comes across as a methodical and quirky cop. Similarly, Arce, a commando of superhuman strength and an exquisite writer, is nonetheless tongue-tied at the sight of a beautiful woman.

De La Pava presents characters widely separated by time and space and then shows us how they become drawn into one another’s lives, despite the odds. Most of all, he inquires into why people fight to comprehend others they barely know.

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But even a die-hard fan has to concede defeat sometimes and Esposito does:  “But “Personae” is not completely successful.”  He gives a few reasons why, but not enough.  

At the end Esposito still praises the author he helped “find:”  “De La Pava is proof that experimental literature can be devilishly entertaining.”

In a review for the November issue of The American Reader, Esposito gives a very negative review of Marías’s Infatuations.  

Phil had noted a contradiction in the book---this passage on page 135

“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with.”

And a second version on page 233  “ What happened is the least of it.  It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.  What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”  

Maria Dolz is reporting this now as something she remembers Javier having told her when she had asked what happened to Chabert back on 135 of our novel.  But now Marías has Maria add “That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else . . . “  

But we know by now that Marías can allow his character Maria to disagree with what Javier told her about the nature of novels because by now we know that Javier’s claim is true, or rather his theory of why novels are important is by now firmly lodged in our consciousness as true and so now we can disagree with it a bit---enjoy hearing Maria disagree with it a bit as a way of emphasizing her reality to herself and her own meditations on her reality versus novelistic reality, all of which further underlines the great reality we have been giving to the novel we are still reading, whatever our own personal real lives are like.  

I looked up the idea of contradiction in The Infatuations and the first piece it found is a review in the Times by no less than Edward St Aubyn.  NYTimes August 8

He describes the novel so well and knows Marías’s work so well that I now despair saying much about it because if I do I will produce a very poor work of envy---the very motive and emotion that the novel depicts.  St Aubyn points this out so well:

quote  Few things attract evil’s indignation more than a Perfect Couple, whether it’s Adam and Eve or Miguel and Luisa. The particular form of evil that preoccupies Marías in “The Infatuations” (as it did in “Your Face Tomorrow”) is envy turning into betrayal. The definition of “envidia,” or “envy,” in Covarrubias’s dictionary of 1611 is quoted three times in “The Infatuations” (the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form): “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.”  unquote

He notes too how Marías conveys great empathy toward the characters and great emotional generosity.  

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Such a high level of reflection and digression (let’s not even get into the amount of literary allusion) might easily become too cerebral, but Marías’s powerful awareness of indecisiveness and delusion is born not only of a speculative frame of mind but of a penetrating empathy. At one point the narrator gives voice to Miguel’s bereaved possessions, the clothes hanging in his cupboard and the novel with the page turned down and the unfinished medication in the bathroom cabinet, to consider what they might make of his death. This feeling of emotional generosity tempers the literary thinking, as do the scenes of pure comedy, like the Oxford high-table dinner in Marías’s novel “All Souls,” with its Buñuel-like degeneration of absurd formality into violence and contempt. 

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Marías’s line about the possibilities a novel infuses us with could be the epigraph for every novel.

The musical style of the work St Aubyn notes well too :  “the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form”

It is so good an essay-review I could just copy all of it out--one more big quotation for how it describes his style---

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Marías has pointed out that the Latin root of the verb “to invent,” invenire, means to discover or find out. His special gift is to bring these two processes, inquiry and narration, into a conjunction, making things up as he discovers them and discovering them as he makes them up. He never works to a plan, and so his prose stays close to the thought processes of a writer working out what to say next and responding to what he has, perhaps mistakenly, just said. “The Infatuations” goes on to explore the narrator’s relationship with the widow and with the best friend of the murdered Miguel. At first he appears to have been killed by a stray madman. The plot, several times changing our perspective on the murder, works very well as a thriller, but it is essentially a pretext for advancing the skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  

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Skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  Seems a perfect characterization.  

Now we could privately debunk a bit just for the exercise.  If Marías is making fun of himself in the portrait of Garay Fontina, the obnoxious writer who is waiting to give his speech for the Nobel Prize, it could be further proof that he is, after all, one of those laureates whose whole trajectory is to win the laurels, in other words the star pupil driven to be the star-of-stars by-the-book, to win the A+ from the teacher, and not by genuine creative brilliance.  What he provides as high entertainment for this generation of readers may not be great literature at all but high-highness of entertainment---yet another variant of masterpiece theater---visible precisely in the supreme command he displays for doing the literary sort of thinking his father the philosopher would have both admired and thought not quite adequate for being not fully philosophical but a fallen literary form of philosophicalization.  Marías may have to suffer winning for literature and not philosophy because I guess there is no Nobel for philosophy.  

“Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author’s company. In Javier Marías’s case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.”   StAubyn

I don’t know if St Aubyn knows that the Spanish consider envy to be their trademark deadly sin.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what games Marías’s novel might be offering to his countrymen.  “Yes, I might get the Nobel, so I know you envy me or will envy me for this, even though you tend to think that I’m not really a Spanish writer but more of an English writer in Spanish costume.”  “If I don’t get the prize, you will envy me nevertheless simply because of the rumors that I might win.  So here is a set of tales of infatuations, or envies, to show how well I understand our national character and how much I count myself prone to the same dominant sin as the rest of you.”  No doubt there could be much more to it than this.  I need to consult with some Spanish friends who have read the book.  And who know the kinds of games Marías likes to play with his native readers.  

Also we must remember that Marías could have written the novel to the Swedes, to give them a game while everyone waits.  “Well, if you give me the prize, I just want you to know that I’m of good humor about it and not at all as conceited or obnoxious as that terrible writer of my own creation in the novel, Garay Fontina, would be.”  “If you don’t give it to me, rest assured I will not indulge the envy we Spaniards are so prone to, but will celebrate the winner with generous and intelligent goodwill.  After all in this novel I have shown how much fun we all have with even the rumors of Nobel prize-dom.”  

Tuesday morning around 10:30

“I only mention it as proof that even the most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that’s even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that. ‘ “ d-v  265

“and all feelings are idiotic as soon as you describe or explain or simply give a voice to them,”  266 

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by page 268 (of 346) I wonder if María will kill Diego--have him killed?  

“He knew exactly how I felt, the loved one always does, if he’s in his right mind and isn’t himself in love, because in that case he won’t be able to tell and will misinterpret the signs.”  269

“ ‘It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.’  Perhaps he thought the same applied to real events, to events in our own lives.  That’s probably true for the person experiencing them, but not for other people.  Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention.  Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true. And so he went on as if I had said nothing.”  (283)

“We do tend to believe things while we’re hearing or reading them.  Afterwards, it’s another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”  292

The novel finishes up in ways very different from what I thought.  So my imagination was way too American about the whole thing.

Brilliant, though.  As soon as I finished it I slipped it into the mailer, walked a block from the cafe to the post office and sent it off to Phil in Washington, DC.  

"Once you've finished a novel," says Díaz Varela to Dolz, "what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”  

Dropping the book into the mail felt like I was getting rid of a virus or an infection.  It was such a relief.  I was glad I had managed to finish reading it in the time I had today with time to get it into the mail.  I was glad I enjoyed it so much even though what I had expected to be the final turns of plot or revelation did not happen.  But then as I drove over to the town where I was to pick Virginia up from her appointment, I realized that indeed the story had possibilities I had not yet considered and the pleasure was all the greater.  Diaz-Varela may have set into motion the events that killed Miguel but are we not sure now, as Maria herself seems not at all to be, that it is Louisa who had delegated the task to Varela.  Maria has been blinded by her infatuation with Varela.  She does not see as clearly as she thinks she does.  Louisa matches the woman in the Three Musketeers story, the woman hanged by Athos, Anne de Breuil, later called Milady de Winter.  

Why would it not work with genders reversed?  Louisa > Louis is married to Miguel > Michelle.  Louis and Michelle have breakfast every morning at the same cafe on Newbury Street.  Mark Dolzet, who works in publishing, also goes there every morning.  

Why even speculate in this way?  Is it homage or envy or both?  The book is wonderful and powerful.  Reviewer for the Guardian or Observer says it is Marías’ best.  Hmm.  Maybe.  Always skeptical of that sort of claim by reviewers.  

 What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events do and to which we pay far more attention.

el enamoramiento -- the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, though not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ...

Wednesday 11:17 in Concord at the Subaru dealer for an oil change.  Diving in to the Createspace site to continue work on the book.  Still rehashing Marías and thinking about whether to really undertake a re-write.  Can always start the book at once and write the book about writing the book.  Vanity publishing thy name is Jubilation! 

“. . . what were shaving brushes made or hairpins made of, when was such and such a building put up or a certain film first shown, the kind of superfluous stuff that bores readers, but which writers think will impress.”  Infatuations (186 UK) 

Monday  November 18

Maria (Dolz) has overheard Díaz-Varela talking with Ruibérriz and knows now that he had Desverne killed in hopes that he could then get Louisa to love him.  But my guess is at this point that (given the Balzac tale about the dead colonel ghost) Diaz-Varela will have the shock of learning that Louisa engaged his services not to join with him but because she had another lover he had no knowledge of and hence he will end up being the ghost, no, the returned dead man, condemned to crime and guilt and having no chance of being in her life.  Our narrator will have to learn this too, first.  what will happen to her?  Maybe she will find love with ?