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Javier Marias Biography

Javier Marías

(Madrid, 1951) Spanish writer.The remarkable technical perfection with which he elaborates his novels, which are inscribed in a line of narrative experimentation, is the characteristic feature of this author translated into many languages ​​and who enjoys unanimous esteem on the part of European critics.His works reflect in an ironic, distanced and introspective way the perplexity generated by the perpetual contrast between reality, appearance and memory.

Javier Marías

Son of philosopher Julián Marías, graduated in philosophy and letters; for two years he carried out his teaching activity as a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Oxford and at Wellesley College (Massachusetts).From his first titles, he was revealed as one of the most personal voices in the Spanish narrative of the moment.The author, whose voice is perceptible in all his works, develops complex characters and uncertain situations, subtly exploring new literary formulas.Although the framework of his novels and short stories is everyday life, culturalist references are frequent, mostly taken from English letters, of which he is very knowledgeable (he won the National Translation Prize in 1979 for his versions of Laurence Sterne , one of the most complex authors of that language).

Before he was twenty years old, he published his first and already mature novel, Los dominios del lobo (1971), full of adventures set in the United States, written in a nimble journalistic style that it paid tribute both to the admired Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and 1960s and to a private Olympus of American novelists, including William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammet, Herman Melville, and SS Van Dine.The novel was one of the first signs of the generational revolt of the 1970s, which would lead an interesting group of novelists and poets (known as "novísimos") to reject the Spanish literary tradition that was identified, on all with the local color of various stages of realism.

Javier Marías was one of the greatest exponents of this new aesthetic trend that placed his own cultural affiliation outside the Iberian sphere, directly opposing the pompous love for the homeland that the Francisco Franco regime preached, but also to the didactic and militant literature of his opponents.With Crossing the horizon (1973) he experimented with an elaborate writing on the canons of the Edwardian novel, exhibiting the influence of Joseph Conrad and Henry James as a provocative artistic manifesto, which claimed the primacy of creativity free from testimonial obligations, both in the choice of themes and in expressive elements.

Like many other authors of his generation, he seems to have only the language of Spanish; its rich syntactic constructions and exquisite lexicon, however, cannot do without the heritage of formal elegance that has its roots in the Golden Age.The fact that language is sometimes expressed through writers more than they are willing to admit is demonstrated in the original work El monarca del tiempo (1978), which Javier Marías defined as a "novel" despite being made up of three narratives, a literary essay and a pièce theatrical, unified by a subtle and versatile analysis of the temporal implications of the truth, analyzed with very varied arguments, which take as a reference from a Napoleonic general to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , passing by a supernatural angel.

With the novel El Siglo (1983), considered one of the most interesting examples of post-Franco narrative, Marías dilutes the initial experimentalism to narrate the vicissitudes that are framed by a a country that is never named, but that an unmistakable civil war makes it possible to identify with Spain, despite the improbable landscapes of its geography and the linguistic versatility of the names of some characters.With prose now solemn, now burlesque, evoking the stylistic refinements of the baroque, especially English, the novel tells the parabolic destiny of an ambiguous character, born not by chance in 1900, who is tortuously identified with splendors and miseries of the Spain of the 20th century.A history of noble impulses and ignominious choices, of transcendental passions and rude games, crossed by an austere feeling of death that transforms it into a renewed disappointment of our time, and that belongs to both the Spanish tradition and the culture of the world.western.

The mildly ironic and reflective tone, as well as the permanent role of the narrator in somewhat nebulous intrigues, reappear in All Souls (City of Barcelona Award, 1989), demystifying evocation of the two years he spent at Oxford University.Despite all these brilliant antecedents, Javier Marías did not begin to be a truly popular writer until Corazón tan blanco (1992), a book with a circular structure that deals with the dangers of investigating one's past at risk to discover what should remain hidden, and with which he won the Critics Award.

His next novel, Tomorrow in the battle think of me (1995), tells of a startling fact that had indelible consequences in the life of the main character, a television screenwriter and writer called Victor French.With this novel the prestige and diffusion of Javier Marías was consolidated, since international prizes rained down on him, among which the Rómulo Gallegos, which was awarded that year, stands out.

Later he published Black back of time (1998) and undertook an extensive trilogy with Your face tomorrow 1.Fever and spear (2002), at the which followed Your face tomorrow 2.Dance and dream , in 2004, and which was completed with Your face tomorrow 3.Poison and shadow and goodbye (2007).He is also the author of the books of stories While they sleep (1990) and When I was mortal (1996), of the volume of essays Pasiones pasdas ( 1991), from the collection of biographies Written lives (1992) and from the compilations of articles Literatura y fantasma (1993), Vida del fantasma (1995), I will be loved when I am missing (1999), The office of hearing it rain (2005) and Where everything has happened.When leaving the cinema (2005).From 2011 are the children's literature book Come find me and the novel Los enamoramientos .In 2006 he was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.

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