Possibilities and ideas abound in the latest offering from the Spanish literary giant Javier Marias. Narrated by a woman named Maria, this intellectual pretzel of a novel is an exercise in ambiguity. As the story begins, a woman who breakfasts in the same café every morning, who has watched Miguel and Luisa dining together for years, enjoying the spectacle of their perfect love, discovers in the newspaper that Miguel has been viciously and repeatedly stabbed to death in the middle of the street on his birthday--and he wasn't the intended victim.
The pleasure of the novel lies in its embroidery on that simple narrative, its homages and tributes, riffs and satires, and baroquely illustrated projections: what could have happened, what should have happened, what might have happened, now that the grieving widow is in the care of his very attentive best friend, the handsome and charismatic Javier Diaz-Varela. Maria meets the widow, begins a casual affair with Diaz-Varela and finds herself falling in love.
Marias is irresistibly compelled to explore every potential development, as his characters weigh all the options available to them, considering all the permutations of human motivation and behavior. The turning points come as surprises, with the casual unpredictability of real life. In elegant language, bursting with a tantalizing array of observations on the way we live our lives, Marias is a world-class performer juggling the dilemmas of mortality, the deceptions of chance and the unbearable difficulty of believing anyone is telling the truth. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.