Javier Marías's Blog, page 190

‘Los enamoramientos’, el número 1

El Cultural

Javier Marías: the Spanish master of mystery

David Annand delights in The Infatuations , a pared-back, morally ambiguous study of a murder

Writers of crime fiction find themselves in the middle of an arms race. To compete in this new world today’s thriller must be equipped with multiple conspiracies that reveal ultimately, and always, pan-institutional corruption going all the way up to the President/the Pope/God himself. Into this world of massacres and media manipulation, drone strikes and biological weapons steps Spanish novelist Javie...

Allan Massie escribe sobre ‘The Infatuations’

She likes to watch a husband and wife who also breakfast there, and dubs them in her mind “the Perfect Couple”. One day they are missing, perhaps, she thinks, away on holiday. Then the man is murdered. She sees his photograph in the newspaper. There is apparently no mystery about the death. He has been stabbed by a deranged beggar apparently suffering from the delusion that the dead man had wronged him by making his daughters prostitutes.

A few weeks later, the widow is back at the café, with...

Retrato de grupo sin maestros

Sciammarella

El 6 de enero se cumplieron veinte años de la muerte de Juan Benet y su amigo Javier Marías publicóuna evocación en EL País Semanal sobre el maestro más influyente de su generación. Decía: “Mucho lo admiré como escritor, pero lo echo de menos como amigo y guía”. Marías señalaba: “Me llevaba veinticuatro y se detuvo a los sesenta y cinco, luego todavía sigue siendo mayor, en mi recuerdo, de lo que lo soy yo ahora”. Marías se preguntaba por las posiciones que su maestro hubiera teni...

Reseña de ‘The Infatuations’

A fine murder story is like a great love affair: an infinite catacomb of excitement, sorrow and desire. Apart from tales of love and death, what else matters to mankind’s stone-age brain? While we continue to push back the frontiers of knowledge, most recently in digital technology, our consciousness remains hard-wired with some very primitive storylines. The lasting challenge to literature is to achieve a satisfying marriage between high art and the low drives of a simple plot. The latter is...

LA ZONA FANTASMA. 10 de marzo de 2013. En los años de la distracción

Leí hace unas semanas, en la revista Qué leer, una entrevista con Muñoz Molina a propósito de su nuevo libro, un ensayo de actualidad. “Es que no hemos estado a la altura de las circunstancias casi nadie”, decía sobre la catastrófica situación en que hemos venido a parar. “El único que ha estado a la altura ha sido El Roto”. Y más adelante añadía: “Cuando hablo de la pérdida del espíritu crítico pienso en gran medida en mis propios colegas”. Dado que Muñoz Molina suele ser persona sensata y n...

‘The Infatuations’. Críticas

The Infatuations

Javier Marías – welcome to the funhouse

One of the books I dream of but will never write is a history of private jokes in the novel, a guide to all those concealed birthdays and vendettas. The book would be gigantic, and also an exercise in proving its own irrelevance –for in the end the only true way to read a novel is to dismiss the question of provenance: fiction is its own oddly impervious reality. There would be chapters on embedded quotations, or the names of friends– and...

‘Gli innamoramenti’

CONSIGLI DI LETTURA:

Gli innamoramenti

Per quale ragione Maria Dolz, la protagonista, voce narrante, dell’ultimo romanzo di Javier Marias,Gli innamoramenti(Einaudi, 2012) sente il bisogno di fermarsi in un bar ogni mattina prima di recarsi al lavoro per osservare una coppia di perfetti sconosciuti, Luisa e Miguel Desvern, mentre fanno colazione?Certamente perché quell’uomo e quella donna così sereni le consentonouna contemplazione concreta della felicità negata dalla letteratura: Maria che lavo...

La biblioteca de Javier Marías

Javier Marías: Conrad y los soldados de plomo.

Hoy, a las 19,30 horas, Javier Marías conversará con Jesús Marchamalo, en la sede de la Fundación Mapfre, en Madrid, Paseo de Recoletos n.23.

También se puede seguir el acto en directo en la Webde la fundación.

‘The Infatuations’

Toward the end of last year, Javier Marías was awarded a prestigious Spanish literary prize and the €20,000 that came with it, both of which he had no hesitation in refusing.

His reasons were simple. All his life, he said, he has avoided state institutions and refused to accept any income from the public purse. “I don’t want to be seen as an author who is favoured by any particular government.”

Noble – and unusual – as Marías’s sentiments surely are, he was nevertheless keen to point out that h...