He is one of the most important and successful contemporary Spanish writers. Successful author Javier Marías (“My heart so white”) died in Madrid on Sunday at the age of 70. His 16 novels – most recently the spy novel “Tomás Nevinson” was published in spring – have been translated into 46 languages and sold a total of nine million copies.
The uncomfortable thinker was considered hard to sell for a long time, until “My heart so white” was showered with unanimous praise in the summer of 1996 – about four years after the appearance of the Spanish version – in the TV show “Das literarisches Quartett”. The “literary pope” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died in 2013, spoke of a “brilliant book” and the “greatest writer alive at the moment”. After the broadcast, the novel conquered the bestseller lists.
Chain smokers and early risers
Marías was one of the “eternal Nobel Prize candidates”, he was praised by such well-known colleagues as Orhan Pamuk and JM Coetzee in the sky. The chain smoker and late riser openly admitted that he was always plagued by “enormous insecurity” when starting a new work in his apartment full of books in the center of Madrid. While the blank white sheet – Marías abhorred computers and always typed on a typewriter – caused him discomfort, the finished work often caused him chagrin later on. “All my novels seem bad to me as soon as they’re finished. I often want to throw all the pages in the wastebasket,” he said.
The man, who, according to his stories, started writing at the age of eleven and made a living as a street singer in Paris in his youth, was a rebel in the literary world. He rarely granted interviews, did not accept awards from government agencies in Spain – nor did he accept any advance payments. His explanation: “I would lose my freedom. And I wouldn’t be able to put a book that didn’t work out in the drawer.”
Marías’ work included not only novels, essays, columns and stories, but also a number of translations from English. The literary trademarks of the enthusiastic supporter of the football club Real Madrid included the precise language, the mixture of reality and fiction and the expansive sentences. He preferred to deal with timeless themes such as betrayal, love and desire.
Source: Nachrichten
