For Pomp and Pathos, for celebrities and pomp had Juan Marsé never anything left. Neither in his private life nor in his works. The Spanish writer, who was regarded as the author of the “little man”, the worker, the loser and the underdog, is dead. He died late Saturday night at the age of 87 in his home city of Barcelona, the main setting of his novels.
Marsé was considered one of the most important Spanish narrators of the present, and has acted for many years as an outsider candidate for the Nobel prize for literature. He never received. In addition to many other awards he got but in the year 2008, the Cervantes prize, the most important literary award in the Spanish-speaking world.
As he was then, twelve years ago, was asked how he would prepare for the Delivery of the Cervantes prize by the then king Juan Carlos, he replied: “I will honestly spend a lot of time said the Tying of the tie. I never“. After the ceremony, he complained that he must carry have tails. “I looked like a penguin.”
the Prime Minister, Sanchez pays tribute to Marsé
Marsé was first and foremost a “Hero” of his Region, Catalonia, but his death Spain put the whole into deep mourning. In television, there were long appreciations, special broadcasts have been announced. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, praised – in the midst of the important EU summit on the reconstruction of Europe – the author of “last day with Teresa” and “If they say to You, I was like…” and the family his condolences.
“I get in Brussels, the sad news that Juan Marsé is gone. He was a key figure of Spanish literature,“ wrote Sánchez on Twitter. The socialist politicians described the novelist of the so-called “Generation of 1950” as a “man of strong Convictions”, “has us transported with his works in the social reality of the Barcelona of the post-war period”.
Marsé has, in fact, described as hardly a Second of the Barcelona before the tourist boom, the ugly and grey industrial metropolis in the period after the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) and the ground-breaking Olympic Games of 1992. In his novels, the reader will not find the promenades, the fine cafes and Restaurants, museums, theaters, and souvenir shops, and tourist flows, which shape the metropolis. Marsé described the dreary, dirty, ugly, and the air bombing of 1938 partly destroyed city. His heroes were social losers and misfits: small-time crooks, prostitutes, drivers, or even decadent Bourgeois.
