Death as a Sculptor

Book Discussion

An Introductory Note: This is not a book review but a reflection on one of the many themes in The Infatuations, novel by Javier Marias. If you have any intention of reading the novel, please be forewarned that this post contains spoilers. For my review of the book, without spoilers, read an earlier post: The Infatuations (2013).

Death can reshape the reality for the survivors of the departed. For example, a man’s death can entirely alter the lives of his surviving family members: his wife and children, particularly. That sounds like a cliché. Javier Marias’ novel, The Infatuations, shows us that death can alter a lot more; it can reshape meanings, relationships, and even morality of the people affected by the death.

Miguel Deverne is killed by an abnormal man right in the beginning of the novel. It seems like an accidental killing. But it isn’t. There are more people than the apparently insane killer involved in the crime and there are motives which are difficult to assess morally.

 Diaz-Varela is a close friend of Deverne and his wife Luisa Alday. Maria Dolz, a stranger, admires the effortless affection that quietly radiates from the couple she observes each morning as they share breakfast at the same café. The murder of Deverne brings Maria and Diaz-Varela close to each other. And Maria learns certain terrible truths about the murder in which Diaz-Varela has a big role.

Miguel’s death puts an end to the daily rituals that Maria used to observe with a lot of interest and amusement: the happy breakfasts, the serene affection between Miguel and Luisa, and the vicarious pleasure that Maria enjoyed watching them. Miguel’s death alters Luisa’s life completely. She says she has now become “a different sort of person, with an unfamiliar, alien mentality, someone given to making strange connections and being frightened by them.” Worse, as days go by, Miguel becomes an attenuated memory and Diaz-Varela is taking his place in Luisa’s life. Was all the former marital bliss that seemed to exist in the life of Luisa and Miguel an ephemeral fiction, fragile and contingent?

Death and the sadness it brings have to be forgotten eventually. Balzac’s character in the eponymous novella, Colonel Chabert, appears like a motif in Marias’ novel. Colonel Chabert is believed to be dead in a battle. His wife remarries and builds a new life. But years later, Chabert returns, very much alive, to reclaim his identity and his rights, only to find that society and his wife want to erase him. The dead have no place anymore in the lives of the survivors. The dead have to vanish; they shouldn’t ever return. Life has to move on.

Maria Dolz, narrator of The Infatuations, wonders whether she should tell the truth about Miguel’s death to Luisa. No, she decides soon. The dead should go and vanish so that the living can get on.

One of the most unsettling consequences of Miguel’s death is how it turns some of our moral certainties upside down. Morality is not absolute, Maria realises. It is porous, easily cracked by the pressure of grief, loneliness, and desire. Death can change the question from “What is right?” to “What can I live with?”

Death is not an ending, but a beginning of new stories. The survivors have to create new stories so that their lives can move on. Death is a silent sculptor of life, in other words. It reshapes the living in ways they neither choose nor control, reminding us that our lives are not only our own, but also the ongoing work of the absences we inherit. And that our relationships may be little more than shallow infatuations in the end.

PS. I reread the novel in the last few days.