With your kind permission I submit – How beautifully he writes Javier Marias– The title of one of your articles Remember the two dates marked as angles September is called:
The first is his birth, on the 20th, in books and more books, to a philosopher father and a teacher mother.. Julian Marias, the father, sometimes sat: now at the typewriter, now in an armchair, taking off his glasses and reading; Sometimes I sit in an armchair in front of the typewriter and take off my glasses to read; sometimes I sit in front of the typewriter and sometimes I sit in an armchair and take off my glasses to read.And mother Lolita Francowho juggles caring for four children, describes the task in a very precise way: how complex, how amazing.
It’s touching when “young Javier” names his parents: Pride betrayed him.
The second date was on the 11th last year, which was also the sad day when he left. Spanish dawn in Mexico arrives in seven hours. It was a gray Sunday morning and the sun had lost its way. Like many people, out of habit, or like almost everyone, out of vice, I check my phone as soon as I wake up. Twitter – it must feel like Gregorio Samsa When he wakes up to the horrific X-ray, he answers or rings, like village church bells, those bells that never tire of ringing until everyone finds out, unexpected news uses the novel The brilliant beginning: “I don’t want to know, but I know…”
So I know, but don’t want to know, that Javier Marias is dead. Not possible if he was on vacation in the Mediterranean. If you are only seventy, if it is already your birthday: the usual but useless denial in the face of unexpected circumstances. The truth is, without almost anyone knowing, he had been hospitalized for over a month.: Back pain suggested pneumonia, which to his smoker’s lungs was “incompatible with life,” one of those phrases he mocked.
When a public figure who is important to us and our history for one reason or another passes away, not only do we share in the collective grief, but we know that we are entitled to a little personal grief. To me, this means that the person who made me understand the huge and underappreciated value of translation will no longer be on this level., as he – among many things related to words – is: spending hours and sleepless nights looking and searching for the exact words to help others not only understand what is written in a foreign language, but to feel that someone is in their The emotions in the world he wants to convey to us, the people who belong to us. “Translators work purely for the love of their art,” he said, “and are paid so little that their names almost never appear on the cover, but on the inside, in lowercase letters.”
To me this means andArticle 940 will not appear in the Sunday Supplement nationin his column “The Phantom Zone,” sent by fax over two decades, where he questions paradigms, takes positions, and reflects on life – politics, society, women, cinema, football – he defines it perfectly as a weekly return to childhood – music, literature, memory, vulnerability, guilt, kindness or the opposite. It awakens and infects feelings and passions. He raises more questions than answers, or gives answers in the form of questions that force people to think. He offered his opinions — and complaints — to improve what he thought could be improved, which was pretty much everything.
His writing is full of elegance, wisdom, rigor and couragewith intellectual freedom: no fear of interruption, no attempt to flatter; he argued due to “the current tendency towards a few single ideas”.
There are no more 17th novels, those that are sometimes more essays on a subject, based on plot or drama, full of truth and ultimately all underlined; those with beautiful Shakespearean names, like Heart So White or “Think of Me Tomorrow in the Battle.” His audience awaited these as eagerly as they await freshly baked bread.
Will your apartment with balcony in a medieval square in the heart of Madrid remain the same?, there is a bookcase next to his desk, with ten rows of bookshelves filled with his 20,000 books? And his armchair, his Olympian machine, on which he typed with one finger from noon to sunset; his manuscripts, his photographs, his films, his tin soldiers; his bed, that scene, Restlessness, sleeplessness and pain, he said?
His work still lives on, and so does his word. His brilliant entrance speech to the Royal Academy of Spain, explaining the necessary role of the novelist in offering us the possibility of a new life in the face of circumstances to which we cannot conform There is only one: “…looking at other people’s lives, even experiencing their lives, or getting a glimpse of our own possible lives, lives we have abandoned, or are out of reach, or we dare not take on. As if, apart from the facts, We also need to know the impossible; besides the facts we need to know the conjectures, assumptions and failures; we need to know the remote, the denied and the possible besides the past or present. ; and, of course, conversations with the dead.” Of course.
The gentleman with half-closed eyes and a calm smile has been well versed in making friends for many years, debating and talking with people all night long, continuing the decadent and sacred art of letter writing, and using difficult green calligraphy to understand. A man with a candid laugh who saw life as a game in which he had to master. From a distance, he appeared to have an arrogant attitude and a bad temper; those close to him said he was warm and generous.
He said: After you die, they will forget you the next day. That’s not how it works, He’s one of those people for whom the opposite happens: knowing that he’s no longer here might teach us a little more about him; and knowing that there won’t be another piece of paper full of words escaping from your machine will do even more things Great value for those who achieve this. Then he said the opposite: the dead, for lack of a more comfortable place, could only remain in the minds of their loved ones. I add that among his readers, among those who look to his judgment for reference, there is something like a friend. And will always be on the list of creditors in Nobel’s bankruptcy case. There are also stamps issued by the post office with his face on them. It is not a small thing to show your face in a letter.
One year has passed, Javier Marías, and the world has not improved: fools continue to rule, as you say in that book. Despite this, we remain true to your memory as you knew how to exist in form and substance without betraying the other by being with the other. How do you stay true to the only keyboard you understand, which is one connected to a scroll wheel, some levers, and an ink scroll.
you like them Las Golondrinas and their rhythms come to you: You will no longer walk fast and tired, the you who would rather walk slowly, the you who is no longer there. But I hope you are.