The Infatuations – Javier Marías

A book that a very well-read colleague of mine gave me because she found it quite abominable and wanted to see if I thought it was just a matter of translation or not. Turns out, I thought it was quite abominable too.

This is now the third novel by Marías that I have read, and it’s by far the weakest of them. It begins like the other two (one of the central characters gets killed off in the first paragraph) and I have the feeling that the author put more effort into the first 20 lines than he did in the rest of the book.

The dialogues are just extremely long monologues, the supposedly deep reflections aren’t that deep, the decision to call the two main characters Javier and Maria is, well, a bit petty (something that one would expect from those writers that Marías spends his time dissing in this book), and even the idea of a random assisted suicide is something that Paul Auster has done so much better in In the Country of Last Things.

So yeah, glad I didn’t buy the book myself. 

The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett

Another book that I bought as second-hand despite the fact that I don’t think anyone had ever opened it (seriously, people these days can’t even read a short Hammett novel?!?).

While the years have led me to think that Raymond Chandler was maybe overrated (I still can’t get over the fact that Marlowe is a first-person narrator who finds all his one-liners extremely witty), I actually do think that Hammett was probably a really good writer (and dare I say it, the book version of The Maltese Falcon is probably better than its movie adaptation).

I’m not going to say that this is a masterpiece, because it’s probably not, but it does remain a very pleasant read after all these years – and Sam Spade is someone I’d like to get to know much more than Philip Marlowe (despite the fact that in my mind they both have Humphrey Bogart’s face, clearly!)

Cesare Pavese - La Bella Estate

A book that I stole from my high-school’s library. Needless to say, I am not proud of it (also because, as it turns out, I really didn’t enjoy the three novels it contains!), but with said high-school being on the Canadian West coast, I am afraid I am unlikely to have the chance to return it anytime soon.

Pavese is the most celebrated author from my area, but the consensus in my family is that he is no match for Fenoglio – primarily because the latter immersed himself in politics, the Resistance and the hard life of the locals, while the latter, well, ultimately did not (he flirted with the hard life of the locals, but really stirred clear of politics at a moment in time when this truly affected everyone, including pretty much all of his friends).

Of the three novels, Il Diavolo sulle Colline is the only one that I actually came to like, at least partially (possibly because it shows the mini culture-clash experience by provincial students moving to the big city), whereas Tre Donne Sole offers some interesting points about solitude and suicide (something which later on Pavese himself ended up committing), but little more, and La Bella Estate to me is just a short story about the small delusions of a young girl discovering the joys of her sexuality in a rather old-fashioned way.