Review
Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías review – the final mystery
The last novel from the late Spanish author is a mesmerising addition to his world of spies and lies
Showing posts with label Spanish writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spanish writers. Show all posts
Monday, December 8, 2025
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar / Review
The narrators of Permafrost (2018), Boulder (2020) and Mammoth, a triptych of novels by the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar, have much in common. They are young, and lesbian, and nameless. They live, or once lived, in Barcelona. And they are disillusioned with the expectations of modern life. Early in adulthood each woman realises that the middle-class mores of her childhood mask widespread conformity and a life of tedium. The way ahead looks bleak. ‘I was tired of inventing resumés,’ says the protagonist of Boulder, who has just taken a job as a cook on a merchant ship. She was tired, too, ‘of having to pretend life had a structure, as though there were a metal rod inside me keeping me upright and steady’. The women also have ambitions: freedom, plenitude, pleasure. Permafrost’s narrator travels to Scotland and Belgium in pursuit of low-effort jobs so that she can indulge her shameless sensuality. She spends her days reading (philosophy, art history), enjoying food (Camembert, Godiva chocolates) and having sex.
Friday, September 16, 2022
Review / Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías
Review: Your Face Tomorrow, by Javier Marías
Javier Marías, who is Spanish, may be the best novelist you've never heard of. People say this, though they never get around to explaining why you've never heard of him, and whether the fault is yours or his or somebody else's. Other people, who have heard of him, say that Marías needs a Nobel Prize; Orhan Pamuk is one of those. Margaret Drabble has confessed to reading one of Marías's novels and then, when she wanted to forget it, well, guess what, she couldn't. Which is strange praise, I have to say, and even a little bit spooky.
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías
The culmination of a triumph of storytelling
James Lasdun
Sat 21 Nov 2009 00.07 GMT
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 560pp, Chatto & Windus, £18.99
Part two of Javier Marías's metaphysical epic, Your Face Tomorrow, culminated in one of the more bizarre scenes of recent fiction. Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited into a nameless sub-section of MI6, finds himself in the handicapped lavatory of a glitzy London disco, looking on helplessly as his boss, Bertram Tupra, attacks a young Spanish diplomat with a sword – "a double-edged Landsknecht sword", no less – breaking several of the man's ribs before all but drowning him in the lavatory.
Javier Marías / Addictive 'Infatuations' Takes A Metaphysical Look At Crime
Addictive 'Infatuations' Takes A Metaphysical Look At Crime
John Powers
August 12, 2013
August 12, 2013
If you're like me, you probably feel exhausted just thinking about how much cultural stuff is out there. A friend recently told me he was reading an acclaimed Hungarian novelist whose books I've never opened. "Please tell me he stinks," I begged, "so I don't have to read him."
Monday, September 12, 2022
Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70
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| Javier Marías |
Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70
Marías, also a translator and columnist, was described as ‘one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers’
Sam Jones in Madrid
Sunday 11 September 2022
The Spanish novelist Javier Marías, author of All Souls, A Heart so White, and the epic, three-part Your Face Tomorrow – and a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature – has died at home in Madrid at the age of 70.
Marías, who had been ill with pneumonia for the past month, died on Sunday, according to his publisher, Alfaguara.
“It is with enormous sadness that we regret to inform you that our great author and friend Javier Marías has died in Madrid this afternoon,” the publisher said in a brief statement.
Tributes to Marías, who was also a celebrated translator and columnist, flooded in.
Writing in El País, his friend and fellow writer Eduardo Mendoza said Marías had overcome his early influences to “to find a voice, a subject and a style that were so distinctively his own that they turned him into a strange phenomenon”. He added: “Javier Marías’s writing doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. It’s easy to parody, but impossible to imitate.”
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called Marías “one of the great writers of our time” and said Sunday was “a sad day for Spanish literature”.
The Spanish journalist and writer Rosa Montero said she had been “hit for six” by the news, adding: “For me, he was the best candidate for the Nobel in today’s Spain.”
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| Javier Marías |
Pepa Bueno, the editor in chief of El País, to which Marías was a regular contributor, said: “The death of Javier Marías is so painful. Today is a day of mourning in Spanish literature and column-writing. [He leaves] a huge void in the paper.”
Marías, who was born in the Spanish capital in 1951, published his debut novel, The Dominions of the Wolf, at the age of 20. It was followed by 15 others, among them All Souls, which was inspired by his time teaching at Oxford University, and A Heart So White, a mysterious meditation on love, family and the past that is perhaps his best-known book.
Despite being a member of Spain’s Royal Academy and an international member of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, Marías was not easily impressed with some literary gongs.
He caused a stir in 2012 when he turned down Spain’s €20,000 national narrative prize for his novel The Infatuations. Although he insisted the refusal was not a snub and had been motivated by his lifelong opposition to the way Spain awards state-backed literary prizes, it did not go down well with the organisers.
“All my life I have managed to avoid state institutions, regardless of which party was in government, and I have turned down all income from the public purse,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as an author who is favoured by any particular government.”
Marías also claimed to have spent his entire career improvising for the lack of a literary project.
“But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure,” he once said.
“There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before.”
Earlier this year, when asked by El País what inspired him to write, he replied: “I write about what seems to me to be particularly serious, dangerous, unfair or stupid. Obviously, I sometimes get it wrong or I can go very much against the current.”
Saturday, November 20, 2021
Carlos Ruiz Zafón / The Angel's Game / Pip goes to Catalonia
Pip goes to Catalonia
Giles Tremlett on a Catalan prequel
Giles Tremlett
Saturday 13 June 2009
T
he identity of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's literary hero soon becomes crystal clear in The Angel's Game, a Gothic prequel to his immensely successful The Shadow of the Wind. The breeze from Charles Dickens and his Great Expectations blows through this novel from the start, as a hero who starts off as a Catalan version of Dickens's hard-done-by young Pip looks set for both greater things and troubled times. There are other winks at Great Expectations, which soon gets name-checked and finally appears as a gift to the young hero that causes him to be beaten black and blue by his father - a lost, violent, book-hating soul from the putrid underworld of early 20th century Barcelona.
The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón / Review by Rachel Redford
The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Orion AudiobooksRachel Redford
Sunday 20 June 2020
Published in Spain as a novel for young adults in 1993, eight years before Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, this story clearly foreshadows that novel's mesmerising, chilling quality.
In 1943 a Jewish family escape their city to an old house by the sea. But greater dangers lurk in the sinister and nebulous figure of the Prince of Mist, who wreaks revenge for old grievances through Max, his sisters and his new-found friend.
With present and past entangled with the real and the unreal, it makes astonishingly cinematic listening, its sophisticated mystery heightened by the narration.
The truth about Spain’s mystery novelist Carmen Mola / ‘We did not hide behind a woman, just behind a name’
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| Jorge Díaz, Antonio Mercero and Agustín Martínez, winners of the Planeta Prize, in Barcelona on Saturday.QUIQUE GARCÍA |
PLANETA PRIZE
The truth about Spain’s mystery novelist Carmen Mola: ‘We did not hide behind a woman, just behind a name’
The three men who wrote ‘La bestia,’ the thriller that won this year’s Planeta Prize, deny claims that they used a female pseudonym as a marketing strategy
JUAN CARLOS GALINDO
TONI POLO
ANA MARCOS
EL PAÍS
Madrid / Barcelona -
The three men who, it turns out, were really writing the best-selling thrillers by Spanish mystery novelist Carmen Mola, have spoken out to tell their story following the controversy sparked last week when their real identities were revealed at the award ceremony of a major literary competition.
Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero, professional screenwriters in their forties and fifties, were persuaded to come forward when their manuscript La bestia (or, The beast), a gory tale of child murders set in Madrid during the cholera epidemic of 1834, was named the winner of this year’s Planeta Prize, handed out by the publishing house of the same name. This year the prize money had been raised from €601,000 to a full €1 million, overtaking the Nobel Prizes in the amount awarded to the winner.
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Juan Marsé / Essential Works
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| Juan Marsé |
JUAN MARSÉ
Marsé was born in Barcelona in 1933. Self-taught, he left his studies at the age of 13 to work as a labourer in a jewellery workshop. His first stories were published in the magazines “Insula” and “El Ciervo”. After a short stay in Paris, he published “Last Evenings with Theresa” in 1966, which won him the Library Short Novel Prize. The theme of the Catalan Bourgeoisie appears again in “The Dark Story of Cousin Montse”. In 1973, the censorship banned publication of his work “If They Tell You I Fell” about Anarchist activism in the forties. He collaborates with various magazines and newspapers, including “El País”, for which he wrote a weekly column between 1988 and 1989. He was awarded the Cervantes Award in 2008. He died in Barcelona, in 2020.
Awards
National Narrative Literature Award (2001)
Cervantes Award (2008)
Cervantes Award (2008)
ESSENTIAL WORKS
LA OSCURA HISTORIA DE LA PRIMIA MONTSE
This is Juan Marsé's fourth novel, one in which he recounts the love conflict between an educated and religious woman and an atheist convict.
First published in 1970, the book presents us with the literary universe that characterises Marsé's subsequent works.
La oscura historia de la prima Montse has a similar plot to the author's previous work, the successful Ultimas tardes con Teresa, namely, the relationship between two characters who come from diametrically opposed worlds, thus implicitly giving rise to conflict. This time around, the main character is an educated, religious woman and her lover, an atheist convict.
One of the novel aspects of the book is the first-person narrator. Consequently, sometimes the narrator is a witness to the events, while at other times the narrator relates happenings that have taken place at some remove in time, or turns into the author's alter ego intervening at particular junctures in the plot.
La oscura historia de la prima Montse has a similar plot to the author's previous work, the successful Ultimas tardes con Teresa, namely, the relationship between two characters who come from diametrically opposed worlds, thus implicitly giving rise to conflict. This time around, the main character is an educated, religious woman and her lover, an atheist convict.
One of the novel aspects of the book is the first-person narrator. Consequently, sometimes the narrator is a witness to the events, while at other times the narrator relates happenings that have taken place at some remove in time, or turns into the author's alter ego intervening at particular junctures in the plot.
LIZARD TAILS
A best-selling novel by Juan Marsé that makes a profound exploration of the limits of style and expression.
The novel is entirely in keeping with Marsé’s previous output, the story being set in the Guinardó district of Barcelona, which is always present in his works. The same is true of the subject matter, which again on this occasion alludes to the thin line between love and hate, good and bad, and truth and lies.
The work seeks to test the limits of the author’s narrative style and expressivity, which explains why the author gives voice to a dog, an unborn child and even to a character on a poster.
The work seeks to test the limits of the author’s narrative style and expressivity, which explains why the author gives voice to a dog, an unborn child and even to a character on a poster.
Awards
IF THEY TELL YOU I FELL
Juan Marsé tells a heartrending, down-to-earth story of post-war Barcelona.
Si te dicen que caí was first published in Mexico in 1973, owing to the fact that the book was censored in Spain. Its first national edition dates from 1976.
The book tells the sordid story of daily life in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Guinardó in post-Civil War Spain. Marsé confronts the reader with the crudity of this national event by way of several stories seen through the eyes of children. The author pursued two objectives on writing the book: to get his own back on the Franco period and to bid farewell to his childhood.
In spite of the censorship, the novel was a great success and has been subject to several revisions and reprints. The book was awarded the International Novel Award (Mexico) in 1973 and was adapted into a film of the same name by Vicente Aranda in 1989.
The book tells the sordid story of daily life in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Guinardó in post-Civil War Spain. Marsé confronts the reader with the crudity of this national event by way of several stories seen through the eyes of children. The author pursued two objectives on writing the book: to get his own back on the Franco period and to bid farewell to his childhood.
In spite of the censorship, the novel was a great success and has been subject to several revisions and reprints. The book was awarded the International Novel Award (Mexico) in 1973 and was adapted into a film of the same name by Vicente Aranda in 1989.
Awards
LAST EVENING WITH TERESA
Juan Marsé's best work, it tells the story of young love between a Catalan bourgeois girl and a young low-life from Murcia.
Published in 1966, Marsé's third novel received international acclaim. Deemed to be his best work, Últimas tardes con Teresa, a period novel set in Barcelona, revolves around an impossible love story between the daughter of a well-to-do family, Teresa, and a young working-class, motorbike thief, Manolo, from Murcia. The choice of main characters reveals the author's wish to confront two opposing worlds, that of the Catalan bourgeoisie and the marginalised world of predominantly, Andalusian immigration. The main male character, called ‘Pijoaparte’, shall enter into the annals of 20th century literary history as the archetype of the low-life immigrant.
The novel was an outstanding success. It won the Library Short Novel Prize in 1966 and was made into a film of the same name in 1984, directed by Herralde.
The novel was an outstanding success. It won the Library Short Novel Prize in 1966 and was made into a film of the same name in 1984, directed by Herralde.
Awards
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