"Literature is a settling of scores with life," said Juan Marsé. The Barcelona writer, author of fifteen novels in almost sixty years, died on July 18 at the age of 87.
One of his most famous works, "Teresa afternoons" (1966) is the chronicle of a transgressive passion between the son of a poor man and a student from upscale neighborhoods. An unacceptable work for puritan Spain and "national catholic" of Francisco Franco, where the censorship cut: "the novel presents various scabrous scenes, its bottom is frankly immoral and it makes there many political mentions of a leftist character". But the sentence never diverted this narrator born from writing.
Worker writer
Just after his birth in 1933, his mother died and his father, a driver, offered the newborn to a childless couple. The baby, adopted by a nurse and a cinematographer, becomes Juan Marsé Carbo.
In the post-civil war years, won in 1939 by Franco's nationalist troops, his adoptive father went to prison as "red" (communist) and republican. He himself left school at the age of 13 to become a jewelry worker: "the need to bring another salary home freed me from a boring college where I was only taught to sing Cara al sol (hymn of the extreme right and Francoism, note) and recite the rosary ", he will say.
At 24, during his military service, he sketched his first novel: "Locked up with a single toy" (1960), centered on a bourgeois youth disoriented after the civil war. The worker amazes the literary world, especially since "almost all the writers, at least in Barcelona, came from the bourgeoisie", he noted. From then on he will not stop rebuilding in his novels the popular district of his childhood and often, reviving Barcelona repressed under the dictatorship: republican, catalanist, secular.
"The cultural and linguistic duality of Catalonia"
Speaking Catalan as a family, he wrote in Spanish and always valued what he called "the cultural and linguistic duality of Catalonia". He harshly criticized the independence movement - which bored him deeply - as the projection of "a Catalonia that does not exist". Marsé has received numerous literary prizes, including the 1978 Planeta for "The girl with the golden panties".
With AFP
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