Already dead Javier Marias. Does he leave, having given us everything he could give of himself? History will condemn him if he does not find a better leisure to spend his time. In the meantime, he leaves us with a large-scale and very peculiar work, a work that needs to be distinguished and sifted. Like any prolific author, he has more successful books than most, but alas! the best of their kind, how much damage they have done…! How much damage they do to those who reach out and don’t come, those of us who kill ourselves to train, to be second…!
Talent, which is a bunch of fate, manifests itself capriciously. He sits on heads that almost never do anything special to receive grace, but seem to attract her. premature baby, He published his first story when he was sixteen.; his first novel The domain of the wolf, from nineteen. story (named The life and death of Martin Iturriaga) It’s boring; included it first in the expanded edition while they sleep and after some time in bad character. Let the reader judge. But none of these circumstances are of interest to us today. Maria continued to grow. When you write wonderful texts for half a century, both the rush and the importance of the date tend to fade.
When he was a very young man, his novels were universally praised for their distance from Spanish reality, a distance rooted in another tradition and sometimes reminiscent of contempt. But such a compliment eventually takes its toll. Every nation needs great novelists to help us explain this, and Javier Marias has escaped that task. Perhaps more gifted than peers of his generation, in his literary microcosm he discords with the use of atmospheres. oxbridge and overpopulation elite, without an accent and in French; as if there were no normal, nondescript and boring people left in the world. Time will tell which title or genre will age best, whether it be his novels (the last two seemed extraordinary to me) or his short stories, essays, articles and unclassifiable practical jokes. It has everything: bargaining and ore, thistles and flowers.
Disputes: with Sela, Trapiello
Then comes the controversy, the characteristic voyage of a literary republic in which each seeks to impose his power at the cost of ostracizing others. Faulknerian student of Benet, lived in constant confrontation with villageto the extent that he was one of those who gave the most hype to the letter in which don Camilo offered himself to the nascent state on July 18 as an informer red. Causes of the Inquisition? It seems to be a non-literary, perhaps only friendship, of Sela with Dolores Franco, his mother, in the spring before the conflict broke out. But the truth is that the future Nobel took many steps – and decisive among them – to Julian Marias released from prison in the first and darkest 40. He remained loyal to Besteiro, with which Franco and Franco’s supporters clarified the Great History as his pettiness as an evil farmer who does not forgive this to my grandfather they would run or pull the border sign, as if “victory” is too big for them. We owe a good presentation of what the Civil War meant, and its final result, to Marias Sr.: “justly defeated and unjustly victorious.”
But not only against Camilo Jose Sela Javier Marias spoke. He also did it against Andres Trapiello, in the late 1990s and beyond, perhaps until he became convinced that “a writer with a very miserable fate” would never outshine him (or so he thought). Marias chided him for writing “determined to be the most servantine of all”, although “the poor fellow does not understand that everything that comes out of his pen smells of checkered slippers and a rancid city casino”. As expected, the Leonese did not sit idly by: “Perhaps some are worried not only by the need to share perfection with millions of other beings, but by the need to do so simultaneously with them, in the kind of logic that sucks in a Spanish gentleman.” Years later, Juan Manuel de Prada used the first chapter of his novel whitebird, black swan to piss them both off. Meanwhile, Manuel Garcia Wine He used every opportunity to remind us that he had compiled a slander, a pamphlet, literary beastfor the sole purpose of conducting fool crusade against Javier Marias, piercing him with a spear based on epigrams:
“Last night, when I was sleeping, / I dreamed, a blissful illusion, / that the great Marias changed / all his adjectives.”
Today, the corpse of Marias – still warm – reminds us that this suffering means little; what fits in half a glass of water; that work is important, not fights between performers. sic transit gloria mundi.
In each figure presented to us, its share of schizophrenia is entirely hidden. Javier Marias is not unique in this. The best of his talents devoted him to the protection of the figure of the father, his father, whom in ghostly life dedicates an excellent article. But he did so knowing that these demands, which he admittedly resented, would not come true. After Franco’s death, those who mistreated the figure of don Julian were not garrulous Francoists with the Fuerza Nueva card, but rather laconic democrats huddled around. Country of those who banished him from their pages and silenced his books. Silence his books… him, don Julián Marias, who during the newspaper’s erratic crawl was his intellectual reference! He was not even forgiven for his immutable idea of national unity, paraded in understandable spainnor his refusal to have an abortion.
At that time, great men of the Socialist Party attempted his civilian death. The philosopher was ridiculed for his status as a senator by royal appointment, “and not elected by the people”. Every time he took the podium, PSOE Upper House spokesman Francisco Ramos reminded him if it mattered, thus avoiding counterarguing his objections to the nascent and impoverishing state of the parties. Nor did the enlightened right pay attention to him, his natural fate, if there was one. He witnessed, endured and regretted too much suffering for the AP oligarchs to read. Perhaps because of this, and also because of his father’s twisted ties to the Videla regime, Javier Marias felt uneasy. claimed it even refused the National Prize for Literature because, he said, his father was never given, but at the same time he kept silent about the obvious: his father was despised most of all by the same people who paid him for a thick Sunday article and reviewed his good books with the same adjectives, which is mediocre.
What a great writer left us; what a contradictory psychology; what a dear name…