I am reading Infatuations by Javier Marias 400 pages published by Penguin Exports.  Maria Dolz, a well-educated professional woman who works as an acquisitions editor for a publishing house, is single, and becomes involved involuntarily in the lives of the family whose father is brutally murdered on the street. Javier Marias is highly esteemed as a major world writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize. His prose is intricate and his narrative style is complex; at times during the first one hundred pages, I almost put the book down. The long passages (sentences with many relative clauses spreading across nearly a whole page or more, allusions to literary works (Shakespeare's Macbeth, Balzac's Colonel Chabert, Dumas's Three Musketeers is dedicated over over twenty pages) that become intertwined with Maria's own narrative, but also force the reader to recognize that there is more to this story than might seem on the surface and frequent interruptions. The meandering has driven me to skip pages but then I settle down again because the story itself is fascinating. The sentences are perfectly structured and it is a fascinating study of a human mind but I am left with the feeling that Mo Yan tells a better story or at the very least, I feel the story is better.