Javier Marías was so discreet that he managed to die in the midst of the real death of the Queen of England, perhaps thinking that the news would appear unnoticed in the midst of television and journalistic trumpeting about the death of Elizabeth II. In this he was wrong, because rarely have I seen so many articles about the death of a person as about his in the Spanish press.
He was loved and admired everywhere, and when he asked to speak at the Spanish Academy —he sat in a corner, which will now remain empty until we choose who will succeed him— the academics used to listen to him in a very strict silence. He spoke with precision and elegance, unlike the current affairs notes that he wrote and in which, sometimes, due to exaggeration with some matter that touched him closely, he used to go too far.
But perhaps he was more proud of the excellent novels he wrote about the Kingdom of Redonda, which he had created proprio motu and that he explained to me, in detail, on a trip we made together to Santander, a thousand years ago. He had manufactured everything himself: the positions, the appointments, the titles, depending on the work of each one. Reino de Redonda, was, moreover, the most unprotected publishing house in Spain, because only two people, he in Madrid and an assistant in Barcelona, took care of it. And yet, the fifty books that he published throughout his existence are, all of them, of excellent quality, and read by an elite of readers.
since i read heart so white, one of his best novels, I thought that his long sentences, which grew from novel to novel, until reaching, without points apart, more than a page, had something to do with William Faulkner, about whom Javier Marías wrote a formidable essay. He spoke English as well as Spanish, due to the lively youth he had had, between the United States and Spain —he was also in Oxford—, and published in Reino de Redonda the book about Faulkner’s trip to Japan, in which he, a lamplighter, told them made naive journalists believe that he was just “a farmer”, a lover of horses, who wrote at great length, without worrying at all about “the form or the structure” of his books, when his readers are in a devilish way she made him reread it, in order to understand it, at least three or four times in each of his sentences. Since he hated journalists, Faulkner told them crazy things about his novels and his writing style, and the extraordinary thing is that the Japanese believed him. But Javier Marías, no, and in that admirable essay it is explained why.
William Faulkner’s prose is the one that best took advantage of James Joyce’s inventions, without losing his own voice, and surely Javier Marías is the most adept reader of William Faulkner in our language, in those very long sentences of the novels that he invented and that are they read, from cover to cover, in a state of glee in which readers do not know what delights them more, the complex plots of their stories or the endless sentences that relate them, always with great precision, in paragraphs that never overlap, thanks to the elegance and rigorous discrimination of its author’s words. In that essay everything is said and explained.
He was the Spanish writer of his generation who came closest to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and at his death many have deplored the fact that he was never awarded it. He was surely on one of the lists of candidates managed by Swedish academics waiting for his turn —because there is no doubt that he deserved it—, and now he must be judged, without prizes or titles, for what he wrote . He will pass the review with merit, because he was one of the best writers of our language and had the wisdom to take advantage, better than anyone, of the lesson of Joyce and Faulkner, so widely read and so poorly translated by our translators. Faulkner’s prose is very tangled and you have to delve into it persistently if you want to understand everything it throws up: thoughts, landscapes, returns to the past and jumps to the future, intermingling of characters who speak or think at the same time, and from that tumult The stories are outlined, always somewhat apocalyptic, that trace an Edenic vision of the fights and guts between whites and blacks in the county of Yoknapatawpha, the small territory of his stories and novels. Javier Marías managed, on the other hand, to be clear and direct in his stories, without those endless sentences that made them up being an obstacle for his readers to follow and understand them. They brought together the past with the present, and different instances of the past, without the reading being misleading or difficult. Because the novel was very well crafted and rethought many times. I, who never listened to him, think that he must have been a magnificent teacher, who infected his listeners with the rich ideas he had about literature, the one he practiced and those of his favorite authors, among whom Joyce and Faulkner always figured first. finished.
Belonging to a family of writers, as was the case with Javier Marías, is not easy. His discrepancies with his father, the Catholic philosopher —and, by the way, an excellent writer, despite the things he defended— were never manifested in the texts he wrote about him, and, above all, at the time of his death , in which he always remembered him with a book at hand and with whom he lived alone, in the center of Madrid, in a mansion full of book shelves, when the rest of the family was dying or moving away. His death has found him alone, although his friends used to visit him and take him out for a coffee or a beer, in the heart of Madrid where he lived, surrounded by many meeting places. He was one of the writers who knew Madrid best and some of his novels give an account of this, with prodigious details of observation. But his stories overlap that city, and they do not abuse it, exaggerating its graces and amenities, or criticizing its old customs, which he used to value as one of Madrid’s charms, even though he did not always agree with the processions, nor the bulls, nor the parades, and even less with the demonstrations in the center, in which he saw a form —or several forms— of barbarism.
His novels always have a way of highlighting some characters, the gonfalonieros of history, among whom love affairs usually arise that almost always end tragically, as in his last novel. Seventy years is a good time to die, without making a fool of yourself yet, nor having ever done so, as was the case with Javier Marías. He was always in his place, the one with good manners and good words, although in his news stories he sometimes went too far, exacerbated by the embarrassment caused by unfortunate and objectionable events. He had no fears and always spoke clearly, although this habit earned him much criticism and not a few enemies, of which he was not even aware. He was a true writer, through thick and thin, who must be read again to understand him properly, and wisely grasp the dark messages he left behind, and which were addressed above all to young people, to the continuators of what was his life, and that he fully assumed, as it should be done. He was one of the most cultured writers of our lands and the messages he left are as if buried in those sentences in which only he usually did not get lost, unlike his readers, who had to reread him so as not to get confused. It is worth doing and, above all, like Faulkner, his teacher, reading it meditating on everything he said.
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