CAUSE OF DEATH: Top US journalists confirm popular author, Javier ‘Julian’ Marias, has died

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that The writer and academic, undisputed figure of letters and Nobel candidate, has died early this afternoon in Madrid due to complications from pneumonia (cause of death) that has kept him hospitalized and in a coma for more than a month. 

Don Julián Marías, “one of the people who has had the clearest concept of Spain, of what this country is, of what is owed to Spain in the world and of what Spain could offer”, as he said of him Don Gregorio Salvador was unjustly reprisaled for his political ideas in a country that “has been quite stingy with my father,” as Marías recalled without being able to forgive. That wound healed in a plot thought that the author turned into the plot (and the underside) of ‘ Your face tomorrow’, a tribute to the father, a huge literary project considered by himself as his “best novel”, “the most complex and ambitious” and “with the greatest breath, drive and strength” in its pages. A novel in three volumes, turned into 30 languages ​​and of which nearly half a million copies were sold worldwide. With the question of a face that will no longer have tomorrow, the disappearance of Javier Marías at the age of 70 of age at the end of this sultry summer, has transformed the calendar of millions of readers into a bleak December.

Tintin, Nabokov, Paris

Javier Marías was born under the sign of literature on September 20, 1951. He is the youngest of five boys (the eldest, Julianín, died at the age of three) and the intellectual environment determined by a teacher mother and a philosopher father make up his personality. His father, pressured by the political situation in Spain, spends long periods in the US, where he teaches at different universities, such as Wellesley College in Massachusetts. There, the family stays in Jorge Guillén’s house, whose upper floor is occupied by Vladimir Nabokov. Perhaps the cries of little Javier, barely a year old, sometimes disturbed sleep, chess or the reading of the Russian writer to whom years later, that boy who became a famous novelist would pay homage, perhaps to compensate for the involuntary disturbances, in a beautiful album: ‘

Since he was eleven years old, Javier has been writing to, in his words, “keep reading what I like”

The Marias child reads Richmal Crompton, Enid Blyton, Dumas, Salgari, Corbert, Paul Féval, Verne and of course, the Tintin comics. But as his friend, the novelist and academic Arturo Pérez-Reverte, has declared on occasion: “I wanted to be Tintin and Javier wanted to write it.” Since he was eleven years old, Javier has been writing to, in his words, «continue reading what I like». He spends the summers with his family in Soria, at the house of Heliodoro Carpintero and his sisters, Mercedes and Carmen, and there he finishes ‘La víspera’, a novel written when he was fifteen that he never published. It is at least singular that many years after that, the two women closest to Javier’s maturity (his friend and assistant Mercedes and his sentimental partner Carmen), close the nominal circle of a biography raised with the narrative structure of his work:

written life

Before he was twenty, Javier ran away to Paris, where he worked on ‘Los dominios del lobo’ (1971), his first published novel. In the mornings he writes, in the afternoons he goes to the movies and at night he sings accompanied by a guitar on the Champs Elysées in exchange for a few coins for his sustenance, “basically bread with mustard,” according to his own testimony. . From then on, writing will be his way of living and relating to the world: he devises film scripts, completes his studies in English Philology, translates classic authors, publishes short stories and stories and begins to collaborate with articles in the press, alternating all this with the appearance of two novels: ‘Crossing the horizon’ (1972) and ‘The monarch of time’ (1978). He opens the 1980s with ‘El Siglo’ (1982), his fourth novel, and begins a decade of travel and university, this time as a teacher: Oxford, London, Boston and Venice, where ‘El hombre sentimental’ (1986) is born. He ends these fruitful years by publishing ‘Todas las almas’ (1989) which already exudes a very recognizable personal territory: a false autobiographical novel allows him to construct a true autobiographical story, but without appearing to be so, in a disturbing and sometimes comical setting.

The 1990s will be the decade of consolidation of the great novelist: He publishes ‘Corazón tan blanco’ (1992), with which he obtains unanimous recognition from national and international critics, who classify him as one of the best writers in Spanish language. He writes, with enormous success, ‘Tomorrow in the battle think of me’ (1994) and begins the writing of what will be one of his reference works within this unique, complex, exclusive Marías territory: ‘Black back of time’ (1998 ).