Written Lives: Essays

About this book

An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe). In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europes most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS) Javier Marias is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy Stevenson Conrad Faulkner Nabokov and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers lives "or more precisely snippets of writers lives." Thomas Mann Rilke Arthur Conan Doyle Turgenev Djuna Barnes Emily Bront? Malcolm Lowry and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals") and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented. Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away") Marias has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here making "the highly improbable assertion that he is as American as April in Arizona " as is Oscar Wilde who in debt on his deathbed ordered up champagne "remarking cheerfully I am dying beyond my means." Faulkner we find when fired from his post office job explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives evidence as Marias remarks that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books this was the one with which I had the most fun."