Javier Marias passed away this weekend before he could be given the Nobel prize for literature. Again, the irrelevancy of the Nobel shines again. Some recent influential and great writers that did receive it include: Nabakov, Borges, Cortazar, Sebald, Calvino . . . .
Here's a take on his life from The Guardian:
When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of "awe and reverence" that he would buy copies of "the then grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there." Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. "I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s," he explains modestly. "But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can't help thinking I must be a fraud."
Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.
"I've never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career," he recently claimed. "But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before."
This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles he is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.
"I've taken my responsibilities lightly," he smiles, "but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility." He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, AS Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. "JM Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters."
Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid's oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn't have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. "And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way."
The Infatuations, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact "Los enamoramientos", the Spanish title, could also be translated as "The Crushes". Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband's death.
Comments