leave to stay

No time to read?
Get a summary

Oceans of ink have been written as a result of the unexpected and premature death of Javier Marías, how could it have been otherwise? And readers who only approach the pavement and complain a little about the opinions of his articles may wonder what makes Javier Marías an indispensable author of our letters. It is so essential that it is almost impossible to find anyone in the so-called literary world who does not have an opinion on the author, and each of his works has fueled literary debate.

The main feature of Marias was her uniqueness. His literature was unlike anyone else’s, not even that of his supporter and teacher, Juan Benet. Their encompassing literary structures, with long subordinates and especially thoughts from Corazón tan blanco, are so distinctive that any of their readers can recognize the author on a random page.

But neither the difference nor the nature of his prose in themselves explain the immense prestige of Marias. There are other factors, such as intuition, that always push him one step ahead of trends and take literary risks.

At just twenty, the young Marías creates a narrative that owes his first published novel, Los dominios del lobo, to his inexhaustible passion for cinema, set in the United States in the twenties with characters stamped by their past. contrary to its hallmark, it is written with a strong dryness that is a breath of fresh air in the musty—and somewhat provincial—narrative panorama of the early seventies.

But if his style begins to gel in Todos las almas and Corazón tan blanco, which transcends the category of campus novel, he’s back with Negra if he manages to screen the essay within the novel, anticipating a conventional narrative source today. del time is a non-fiction novel and at the same time a self-fiction that is sewing the seams of the novel genre in our country. Luckily for readers, it’s the seams that many subsequent writers have decided not to fix.

But perhaps the greatest dare will be accepted tomorrow by your face. Three volumes of more than 1500 pages: Javier Marías himself – I imagine exhausted by the enormous effort – threatened to stop writing fiction after the publication of this novel. For a writer who wanted to take the story lightly, it seemed insane to attempt such a big deal. However, it clearly succeeded, and the result was an excellent work in Marías’ best qualities: time management, reflection, minor off-topic remarks, and accusations of depth, all in a genuine state of enlightenment.

But any attempt to explain what makes Javier Marías an indispensable writer inevitably becomes a reductionist exercise. We could add the perpetual moral dilemmas, the subtractions, the atmosphere, the subtle humor, and of course the flair and glitz of the wit, but we still couldn’t naively articulate that state of hypnosis, the literary intoxication. you just want to go out to memorize or highlight an idea or a passage.

Almost all writers, even those who are greatly admired or respected in life, tend not to be passed on to succeeding generations and to fade after the author’s death. Most likely, his press articles and philological debates (such as his vigorous defense of forgery) will be forgotten, but Javier Marías is here to stay.

Therefore, if any reader wanted to immerse himself in the work of Javier Marias for the first time, I would only warn him that his books are not suitable for hasty or impatient reading, and that whatever novel he chooses is most likely destined to be this book. It should be considered a classic of Spanish letters.

No time to read?
Get a summary
Previous Article

The first drop is the drop that begins to become the ocean

Next Article

Weight Loss Pumpkins