For a long time, Javier Marías’ books were considered hard to sell in Germany – until his work “My Heart So White” was showered with praise in the summer of 1996. The writer was one of the most successful contemporary Spanish writers. Shortly before his 71st birthday he died unexpectedly.
At his 70th birthday almost a year ago, Javier Marías was as critical and argumentative as ever. The man, who is one of the most important and successful Spanish writers of the present and has many fans in Germany, was according to some critics in top literary form. Marías died surprisingly on Sunday, just a few days before his 71st birthday. The Spanish newspaper “El Mundo” reported that he had succumbed to pneumonia as a result of a corona infection.
His last book, the spy novel “Tomás Nevinson”, published in Spain in spring 2021, was probably Marías’ best work ever, according to the literary critic José Carlos Mainer. From this autumn the novel will also be available in a German translation from Fischer Verlag. For a long time, the uncomfortable thinker was considered difficult to sell, even in Germany. Until “My heart so white” was showered with unanimous praise in the summer of 1996 – around four years after the appearance of the Spanish version – on 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 in the world alive at the moment”. After the broadcast and further positive reviews, the novel conquered the bestseller lists and the German translation alone sold 1.2 million copies. Marías, who was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, was delighted with the success in Germany but also wanted to maintain a critical distance. “I’m not good because the Germans or others say so.” There are writers whose books “only sold a few thousand copies and went down in history,” he emphasized a year ago.
According to his publisher Alfaguara, Marías’ 16 novels have been translated into 46 languages ??and sold more than nine million copies. The author is one of the “eternal Nobel Prize candidates”. He is supported by such notable colleagues as Orhan Pamuk and J.M. Coetzee praised to heaven. The chain smoker and late riser openly admitted that he was always plagued by “enormous insecurity” when he began a new work in his book-filled apartment in central Madrid. The older he gets, he understands “less and less how novels are made,” Marías said a year ago. While the blank white sheet – Marías detested computers and always typed on the typewriter – caused him discomfort, the finished work often caused the literary historian and university teacher annoyance.
“All my novels seem bad to me immediately after completion. I would often like to throw all the pages in the wastepaper basket,” he said at the time. Marías wasn’t just harsh on himself. In his column for the newspaper “El País” he ruthlessly criticized many and many people. He complained about authoritarian heads of government of all stripes: “We live in a time full of famous fools.”
The man, who according to his stories started writing at the age of eleven and made a living as a street singer in Paris, was always a rebel in the literary world. He rarely granted interviews, refused awards from government agencies in Spain – and did not accept any advance payments. “I would lose my freedom. And I wouldn’t be able to put a book that didn’t work in the drawer,” he said as a reason.
The author was the second youngest of Julián Marías’ five children. The well-known philosopher (1914-2005) spent a long time behind bars as an opponent of the Franco dictatorship and had to emigrate to the USA for a while in the mid-1950s. Javier Marías grew up bilingual. He earned his first money as a child not only with short appearances in films by his uncle Jesús Franco, but also as a translator. In the 1980s he taught at Oxford University. He worked on his experiences in Great Britain in the novel “All Souls or the Madmen of Oxford” (1989).
Marías’ work includes not only novels, essays, columns and short stories, but also many 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 wide-ranging sentences.
He mainly dealt with themes such as betrayal, love and desire. Marías, who was hailed as the “innovator” of Spanish literature in the 1980s, once said that writing is fundamentally “abnormal and funny”. He described it in “The Mortal Lovers” (2011). According to Marías, a publisher’s employee found out in the novel through daily contact with authors “how tiresome, stupid and conceited we (writers) are”.
