Javier Marías entre los Sexiest Man Living 2007
Our alternative to that annual Bible of Sexy -- with its catalog of lantern jaws, bulging biceps and Seacrest hair -- struck such a rich chord with you last year that it's back, and looks to be here for good. We've got 26 more men that, sure, are easy on the eyes, but who also unleash complicated emotions in us that we just have never been able to articulate. Until now.
[…]
Who: Javier Marías
Age: 56
Know him as: Novelist
For weeks after my first encounter with Javier Marías I could scarcely speak of anything else. "'A Heart So White' is so good that I can't concentrate," I confessed to a co-worker. This was no exaggeration; I was smitten.
With his lettered looks and distinguished intellectual pedigree (his father, Julian Marías, was a renowned philosopher), Javier Marías seems an inhabitant of his scented, sophisticated fictive worlds, in which secrets, scandals and spectral narrators lurk in shadowy corridors. Everything, down to his slowly unfolding phrases, which swell with dependent clauses, is permeated with suspense. The moral haziness of his characters, the stylishness of his writing and the sound of footsteps echoing through his narratives lend a noir tone to his work and betray his cinephilic sensibility: In addition to his fiction, Marías has written a collection of articles on film (not yet translated into English), "Donde todo ha sucedido. Al salir del cine."
Marías' allure lies in his prodigious talent -- he wrote his first novel, "Los dominios del lobo," at the age of 17 -- and his capacious mind. Far from confined to his ivory tower, Marías keeps a hand in the journalist world, penning a weekly column for El País. (His polemic on Spain's smoking ban, which ran in the New York Times, was persuasive even to this nonsmoker.) And, like so many of his narrators (opera singers, ghostwriters and interpreters whose careers demand that they cede their own voices) Marías works as a translator. The man is so ultra-literary that he hasn't only read "Tristram Shandy," he has rendered it into Spanish.
Part of Marías' cachet comes from the fact that he remains scandalously under-read on this side of the Atlantic -- despite a devoted readership in continental Europe and rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. It has become de rigueur to begin every English-language article on Marías tsking about his relative obscurity in the Anglophone world. This is a shame; Marías is too good to be for the happy few. The quality of a bookstore can -- and should -- be judged by whether it stocks Marías on its shelves.
I tend to claim that most of the things I love in life -- cities, certain countries, entire centuries -- were made for me; I, on the other hand, was born to read Javier Marías' fiction. That is the most romantic relationship between a reader and a writer that I can imagine.
MEGAN DOLL
Salon.com, 15 de noviembre de 2007
[…]
Who: Javier MaríasAge: 56
Know him as: Novelist
For weeks after my first encounter with Javier Marías I could scarcely speak of anything else. "'A Heart So White' is so good that I can't concentrate," I confessed to a co-worker. This was no exaggeration; I was smitten.
With his lettered looks and distinguished intellectual pedigree (his father, Julian Marías, was a renowned philosopher), Javier Marías seems an inhabitant of his scented, sophisticated fictive worlds, in which secrets, scandals and spectral narrators lurk in shadowy corridors. Everything, down to his slowly unfolding phrases, which swell with dependent clauses, is permeated with suspense. The moral haziness of his characters, the stylishness of his writing and the sound of footsteps echoing through his narratives lend a noir tone to his work and betray his cinephilic sensibility: In addition to his fiction, Marías has written a collection of articles on film (not yet translated into English), "Donde todo ha sucedido. Al salir del cine."
Marías' allure lies in his prodigious talent -- he wrote his first novel, "Los dominios del lobo," at the age of 17 -- and his capacious mind. Far from confined to his ivory tower, Marías keeps a hand in the journalist world, penning a weekly column for El País. (His polemic on Spain's smoking ban, which ran in the New York Times, was persuasive even to this nonsmoker.) And, like so many of his narrators (opera singers, ghostwriters and interpreters whose careers demand that they cede their own voices) Marías works as a translator. The man is so ultra-literary that he hasn't only read "Tristram Shandy," he has rendered it into Spanish.
Part of Marías' cachet comes from the fact that he remains scandalously under-read on this side of the Atlantic -- despite a devoted readership in continental Europe and rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. It has become de rigueur to begin every English-language article on Marías tsking about his relative obscurity in the Anglophone world. This is a shame; Marías is too good to be for the happy few. The quality of a bookstore can -- and should -- be judged by whether it stocks Marías on its shelves.
I tend to claim that most of the things I love in life -- cities, certain countries, entire centuries -- were made for me; I, on the other hand, was born to read Javier Marías' fiction. That is the most romantic relationship between a reader and a writer that I can imagine.
MEGAN DOLL
Salon.com, 15 de noviembre de 2007
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