Infatuation
1909
In 1909, a young woman named Phyllis Ladd navigates the treacherous terrain between childhood and adulthood in the shadow of her mother's death. Growing up in the gilded cage of her father's wealth, a railway president's mansion, she must negotiate the impossible expectations placed upon women of her station: to be both innocent and desirable, autonomous yet obedient. The novel follows Phyllis as she comes of age, forming an intense bond with her father while wrestling with her first encounters with romantic love. When suitors present themselves, a man of the cloth and a military officer, Phyllis must choose not just between men, but between competing visions of herself. What emerges is a quiet, penetrating study of how daughters absorb their fathers' expectations, how grief shapes desire, and how the marriage market reduces women to currency. For readers who savor the psychological subtleties of early feminist fiction, this novel offers a window into the interior life of a woman before she has language for her own confinement.
Editions
X-Ray
“La gente empieza viendo una cosa y acaba viendo la contraria. Empieza amando y acaba odiando, o sintiendo indiferencia y después adorando. Nunca logramos estar seguros de qué va a sernos vital ni de a quién vamos a dar importancia. Nuestras convicciones son pasajeras y endebles, hasta las que consideramos más fuertes.También nuestros sentimientos.””
— Unknown
“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.””
— Unknown
“We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Every morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday--the balance of power--that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us.””
— Unknown
“... I had stayed still and let the days pass, which is the best way to allow things in the real world to dissolve or break down, although they remain forever in our thoughts and in our knowledge, solid and putrid and stinking to high heaven. But that is bearable and we can live with it. Who doesn't carry something of that nature around with them?””
— Unknown
“Some people think that being in love or infatuated is a modern invention that appears only in novels. Be that as it may, it nevertheless exists, the invention, the word, and our capacity for such a feeling.””
— Unknown
“It’s true that when we get caught in the spider’s web”
— Unknown
“For me that's the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can't be quite that straight forward because it doesn't exist in many languages, only in Italian and Spanish, as far as I know, but then again, I don't know that many languages. Perhaps in German too, although I can't be sure: 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, although not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ... We find a lot of people funny, people who amuse and charm us and inspire affection and even tenderness, or who please us, captivate us, and can even make us momentarily mad, we enjoy their body and their company or both those things, as is the case for me with you and as I've experienced before with other women, on other occasions, although only a few. Some become essential to us, the force of habit is very strong and ends up replacing or even supplanting almost everything else. It can supplant love, for example, but not that state of being in love, it's important to distinguish between the two things, they're easily confused, but they're not the same ... It's very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness.””
— Unknown
“Lo que pasó es lo de menos. Es una novela, y lo que ocurre en ellas da lo mismo y se olvida, una vez terminadas. Lo interesante son las posibilidades e ideas que nos inoculan y traen a través de sus casos imaginarios, se nos quedan con mayor nitidez que los sucesos reales y los tenemos más en cuenta.””
— Unknown
“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.””
— Unknown
