The eminent Madrid novelist, author of “such a white heart” or “Berta Isla”, died in her hometown, Sunday, September 11, from pneumonia, at the age of 70 years.
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a great Spain. This is the image that is essential when we think of Javier Marias, this eminent Madrid novelist who died in his hometown, Sunday September 11, from pneumonia. He was 70 years old. Writer, translator, publisher and columnist in the newspaper El Pais, the author of a heart so white and of tomorrow in the battle, thinks of me (Rivages, 1993 and 1996) was not only one of the Spanish authors More read in the world – his fictional work, with fifteen novels and short stories, is translated into nearly forty languages and published in sixty countries. He was also a man with a particular nobility of soul. In 2012, he refused the national prize for the novel, because he said to the “world of books”, “the State had just suspended his aid from the libraries, and that [he] found it moved”. This same elegance, we find it in its prose, of a timeless clacissism, far from the modes and the alleged “expectations” of the market: a fine and subtle writing, developing in long garlands of sentences and incises, to better follow complex paths, infinite ramifications of human thought. In its deep darkness and unpredictable darkness.
prohibited teaching under Francoism
Born September 20, 1951, in Madrid, Javier Marias is the son of a teacher and philosopher and sociologist Julian Marias Aguilera (1914-2005), militant republican and close to the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) . In the 1950s, while Francoism dominated Spain, Julian Marias was prohibited from teaching and forced to go into exile with his family in the United States, where he gave lessons at Yale University (Connecticut). This Anglo-Saxon childhood will permanently mark the young Marias. Fallen in love with English -speaking letters, he will translate many authors into Spanish (Roger Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Laurence Sterne …) before leaving in turn to teach Oxford, where he will occupy a chair of literature until 1988.
It was at 19 that Marias published her first text. But he had to wait until 1986 (he was then 35 years old) that his fifth novel, the sentimental man (Siquings, 1988, Prix Herralde) propelled him into the light. He really pierces in the 1990s with a heart so white or in the black back of time (shores, 2000), before reaching the peak of recognition with like loves (Gallimard, 2013) and Berta Isla (Gallimard, 2013 and 2019). If we transposed them into graphics, we would see that all Marias’ novels are more or less organized in the same way: in abscissa, history, time, war; In order, individual destinies, love, marriage, secret; Each of its stories located at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the history and the intimate. With a favorite theme crossing the whole work: betrayal.
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