Six books to understand Javier Marías

• Javier Marías dies Uncomfortable purity

• Javier Marias The cosmopolitan

• Interview "I am an insecure writer"

Heart So White (Anagram, 1992)

The narrative plenitude of Marías, or at least, the work with which he reached the highest status in European narrative.

So White Heart takes its title from Macbeth but it is also quite a

bourgeois, cultured and Frenchified, a psychological investigation on desire, marriage and the relationship between father and son (male).

All Souls (Anagram. 1989)

We would have to search, surely something will end up appearing, but was there ever a campus novel in Spanish narrative before

?

The first Óxford novel by Professor Marías fulfilled all the promises of his work: the delicacy in the characters, the invisible style that ended up enveloping everything, the capacity for evocation... And, in addition, it included a new pleasure: the character of the Spanish teacher was not a short man but a charming professional capable of making the girl fall in love.

Berta Island (Alfaguara, 2020)

With the last Marías it seemed that the years were stripping him of arabesques, that he seemed increasingly obsessed with the pleasure of narration and that he cared less about fashions, stylistic challenges and currents of opinion.

, made to be read alongside his sister novel,

, is a spy novel that branches off into sweet sadness, reminiscences of other times, and adventures that seem innocuous but are full of meaning.

Black back of time (Alfaguara, 1998)

If

represents the last Marías, playful and melancholic at the same time,

shows her most intellectual and introspective version.

In reality,

was made to dialogue with

, to be its counterpoint.

The setting was once again Óxford, the years of Marías's teaching, but the hero was no longer an idealized transcript of the car, but he himself, given over to his obsessions, to his not entirely necessary research on mid-level English authors.

The word autofiction did not become popular until 10 years later, but Marías was already there.

Your face tomorrow (Trilogy. Alfaguara 2002-2007)

In the three installments of

, the two Marías cross paths: the dreamy boy who evoked old-fashioned adventures and the virtuous writer who often threatened to go from the psychological to the philosophical novel.

is, like other novels by Marías, a story more or less of mystery and almost of delirium.

In addition, it presents its most nonconformist version in relation to language.

His readers' comments on

often refer to Proust for reference.

is the Marías for readers with a well-trained ear.

Past Passions (Anagram, 1991)

Javier Marías has also been a very notable writer in the press.

In recent years, his work has tended towards a melancholy, a detachment from the modern world that today seems to be a harbinger of his early death.

Pro there was a time when the non-fiction texts of Marías served to discover looks.

Marías looked with new eyes at football, the cities he visited, cultured or popular cinema and the Madrid cultural elites whom he met through his father and his filmmaker uncles, Jesús and Ricardo Franco.

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