Javier Marías dies at the age of 70, the uncomfortable purity of being a writer

Javier Marías

has died at the age of

at the Quirón Clinic in Madrid due to problems arising from

caused by covid and which has kept him hospitalized for several months.

On August 14, the writer's family distributed a brief note through the Communication department of Marías' publishing group, Penguin Random House, explaining that the author of

was "in the process of recovery."

But the severity of the severe lung condition has increased in recent weeks, to the point of insurmountability.

The writer will be cremated in Madrid, the city of his birth.

In the neighborhood of Chamberí (common in some of his novels) he spent his childhood and youth.

He was the son of the philosopher Julián Marías and the teacher and translator Dolores Franco.

Marías leaves an exceptional literary work.

.

He leaves an inherited monarchy where he was the head of the list and that gave way to a sagacious and exquisite publisher (Kingdom of Redonda).

He leaves a disagreement against some things of the present.

It leaves the echo of an agile irony.

And he also leaves polemics displayed in articles.

And he leaves translations, memories of many films - he was the nephew of the eccentric director Jesús Franco -, even a notch of children's literature,

.

Yes, a children's story by the

Marías.

And he is a writer who, happily, makes him uncomfortable.

And he is, at the same time, a guy who shines.

Something very interesting happens with the novels of Javier Marías.

A formidable first scene confuses things and leaves loose ends that will remain loose throughout the novel because they do not aspire to be fully resolved, because that is the way to investigate the shadows and the visible, between the known and the silent, between the hidden and the apparent, between the barely guessed.

A game of light and shadow where individuals are exposed to a mystery, a vertigo, a restlessness.

It is what we could call "the voice of Marías", that condition of their own territory

, the recognizable, the style, that poetry that never supplants, but proposes and illuminates whoever approaches.

The reason why you like his literature is obvious: he is an intelligent writer who, coming out of his books, offers a certain idea of ​​the world.

Armored with books (some in exquisite editions), lead figurines, scattered photographs and other unforeseen fetishes, he lived more and more removed from the literary fervor in his mansion in the center of Madrid, a third in a square where his is the only inhabited building. .

There he wrote and dispensed

of this country.

He started in the narrative at the age of 20, with a title now recovered by Alfaguara (where all of Marías's work is found):

(1971).

He continued with the novel

(1973) and

(1978).

In those 70 he began to collaborate in the press -something he maintained until the end- and joined the group that brought together Juan Benet and where Elías Querejeta, Javier Pradera, Eduardo Chamorro, Félix de Azúa, Juan García Hortelano, Vicente Molina Foix or Antonio Martinez Sarrion.

Benet's intermediation was key for Marías to publish that first novel.

The letters between Benet and Marías, numerous, are unpublished.

Only one of Benet has been published to his disciple, baptized as "the young Marías", in the commemorative edition for the 25th anniversary of

.

That young Marías, some nights of grace,

in the Paseo de la Castellana and unleashed the ovations of his older friends.

Pérez-Reverte, Vargas Llosa and Marías, in 2015. BERNARDO DÍAZ

With each novel, he gained a better place among the most outstanding writers of contemporary Spanish narrative.

In 1986 he won the Herralde Prize for

, he joined the Anagrama team and remained until the mid-90s, when the founder of the label, Jorge Herralde, broke up.

In 1989 he published

(title taken from Shakespeare, as he would later do in at least five more books), which placed him on the podium and where he winds up the story of a Spanish professor who teaches at the University of Oxford.

A little before the departure of

Between 1983 and 1985, Marías taught Spanish Literature and Translation Theory at Oxford.

In 1984 she would do it at Wellesley College and between 1987 and 1992 at the Complutense College in Madrid.

He was also a visiting professor at the Madrid School of Letters.

Teaching was another gym to earn a living while literature didn't stretch that far.

And like everything in Marías,

: the protagonists of his novels written since 1986 are interpreters or translators, "people who have given up their own voices," he said.

Marías's writing is about to reach its power of distinction.

That way of telling that has its own undulation.

the ellipses.

Thought as a narrative impulse, more than invention, ethical and moral dilemmas, secrecy as poison, betrayal as a threat, violence, repentance, lies:

, he wrote... In 1990 he published the first set of stories,

;

and a year later the first collection of articles volume,

(today there are almost twenty titles in this registry).

And then yes, in the Spanish year of all splendors (1992), the one of abundance and the horizon of gold leaf, she publishes

heart so

It is the shuttle to a vibrant success.

In Spain this novel becomes the most celebrated piece by Marías, of the generation and almost of the decade in progress.

In Germany, it reached figures of an editorial phenomenon when the legendary German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki mentioned Marías as one of the most important living authors in the world in the German television program he directed,

.

Marías was still visible, but it was getting more and more difficult.

In 1994, Víctor García de la Concha suggested that she submit her candidacy to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), but she was not seduced by the proposal.

She accepted Spanish awards (Salambó, Critics' Award, Fastenrath Award from the Royal Spanish Academy, City of Barcelona Award...).

He maintained a certain literary life... That year of the "no" to the Academy, he premiered another stage of his work with

',

(1998 and his intelligent self-fiction adventure), the trilogy

(2009) and

(2011), another editorial success with which he makes the decision not to accept institutional permits in Spain and rejects the Nacional de Narrativa in a press conference in which he says: "

If I were ever offered any prize that we call state, I would not accept it. So I make it a rule not to accept anything that comes from the State of my country, even less something that involves money. "

That also ruled out the Cervantes concession.

.

And it is a foreign recognition.

In recent years he has been in all the pools as a possible receiver.

Perhaps this is the award that he best deserved.

In 2005, he did accept a seat at the RAE

, chair r is the one he occupied, and on June 29, 2006 he read the entrance speech, 'On the difficulty of counting', to which the philologist and Cervantist Francisco Rico responded.

Javier Marías dedicates a novel at the 2011 Book Fair.ANTONIO HEREDIA

Marías, in the manner of one of the writers he admired and promoted in Spain, the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, chose not to have a link with the

(as he said: "establishment") of national awards.

De Bernhard also took on the increasingly stripped-back attitude towards literary tolls.

And the strength of opinion.

In his articles in

he provoked (intentionally) some controversy.

Once the

was squeezed out (a role he played with perfect humor, although it may not seem like it), he took the opportunity to express his skepticism or his rejection in some civic manifestations such as the growing loudness of

,

, the pathetic nature of most of the political body, television and its drifts, or the mistrust generated by

.

Marías reached the age of XX without operating a computer.

She kept allegiance to the electric typewriter for 16 novels, thousands of articles, hundreds of short stories, and other merchandise of the trade.

"It's getting harder and harder to find ink cartridges, but I'm not going to give it up now..." she said.

Poetry was also close by

.

He translated the poems of Stevenson, Ashbery, Faulkner, Nabokov... All these authors were strongly in his literary saints.

To all he fulfilled devotion and in poetry he always kept attention.

The Irishman Seamus Heaney was another of his well-read poets.

Marias was not a hermit.

Not a hermit.

Not a tragic balcony and gloom.

He kept a compact group of friends: Agustín Díaz Yanes, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Luis Antonio de Villena... Life granted him adventures.

Many unique expeditions.

And of all he did what he wanted to do: literature.

Of him.

Even in the enigma of knowing if he was serious or not the literary thing came out.

Surrounding Marías were two incombustible women: Carme, his wife, and Mercedes, his assistant.

Everyone around the writer went through them.

They were the first to read the manuscripts of

(2014),

(2017) and

(2021).

The last three novels.

There is in them something of what Borges said for another matter: "Any destiny, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment:

he is".

Everything begins or ends there.

Who was Javier Marias?

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• RAE

• Complutense University

• Germany

• novel

• literature

• Articles Antonio Lucas