Written Lives [Hardcover]

Javier Marias (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2006

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 Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías 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 Brontë, 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"), Marías 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 Marías remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The writers whose lives are sketched in this quirky and appealing book by the world-renowned (though less so here) Spanish writer Marías are familiar to any avid reader: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Djuna Barnes and William Faulkner, among others. Marias says his aim is to examine writers about whom "absolutely everything" is already known and portray them "as if they were fictional characters." He distills each writer's salient personality traits to outline definitive if idiosyncratic portraits: thus "Nabokov in Rapture"; "Ivan Turgenev in His Sadness." Almost all of these essays display Marías 's dry humor and affectionate tolerance for his subjects' eccentricities, but the portrayals of Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Yukio Mishima bristle with Marías 's disdain. And sometimes the title phrase is tailored to an idée fixe rather than intrinsic to the subject ("Robert Louis Stevenson Among Criminals"). The book is distinguished by supple turns of phrase and bon mots ("every true gentleman has behaved like a scoundrel at least once in his life") and by the photos of each writer from the author's own collection. Reading these portraits is addictive; one keeps turning pages in anticipation of Marías 's keen and amusing analyses. (Feb. 28)
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Review

Another example of the prolific literary genius of Marías. -- Lydia Gil, EFE

Delicious snippets previously unheard of. -- Bloomsbury Review, Patricia Dubrava

Delightful reading. -- The Advocate

Encyclopedic. Magisterial. Indispensable. -- East Bay Express, Chris Ulbrich

Guilty good reading. -- Metro, John Freeman

It is Mariás' great gift to convey a depth of understanding of art and existence in a few sparse sentences. -- The Electronic Review, Frank Aiello

Marías weaves thousands of glittering bits into the most gorgeous portraits, each two to five pages long. -- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Mariás has pointed out what we might never think of seeing. -- The Boston Globe, Richard Eder

My premonition is that Written Lives will be regarded as a landmark text in the history of biography. -- Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

The books is notable for Mariás' wit and charm but also for its unabashed and refreshing subjectivity. -- San Francisco Chronicle, Jamie Berger

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; Tra edition (February 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121611X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216111
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #660,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master of Gossip, March 4, 2006

By 

Fernando Melendez "fermed" (San Diego, California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Written Lives (Hardcover)

Gossip has had a bad rap: it has been made out to be an inferior order of communication, petty and vindictive, underhanded even; the word itself, with its double s's hanging in the middle like empty meat hooks ready for the next flesh to skewer and expose, suggests aggressive intentions; yet as a devotee of gossip I am sure that nothing is further from the truth: ah, truth, the essence of gossip; anything less is slander, or lies, or libel, or plain maliciousness. Gossip is about truths that people would prefer to keep hidden precisely because it may render and reveal the true image that exists behind the phony coverings. Gossip can be, and often is, the magic key that opens a person's soul for all to view. It is anti-spin material and, at its best, it yields, in shorthand, exquisite revelations about a person's character.

Javier Marias's WRITTEN LIVES is superbly gossipy. Its subject is a group of 20 writers chosen by the author in a manner "entirely arbitrary." This (arbitrariness) adds an additional layer of variety and surprise to the list, which includes Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Henry James, Nabokov, Lowry and Kipling. Or, more precisely, three Americans, three Irish, two English, two Scottish, two Russian, two French, one Polish (Conrad), and one each from Denmark, Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany and Japan. Absent are any from the author's own country of Spain, an absence extensively and obscurely explained by the author in his prologue. The type of gossip profusely seeded throughout the book cannot be easily tabulated, but includes (of course) sexuality and perversity, bowel activity, wit, suicide and other aggressive acts, drunkenness, travel, and an assortment of peculiarities of mind, soul, habits, and body, as well as death itself. The exact date, and sometimes the manner of death, form part of this tableau of little anecdotes.

Javier Marias, himself a perennial candidate for Nobelizing (or so gossipy Spaniards believe), is a master of subtlety and indirection; and while he would never reveal his intense regard for Nabokov, he remembers the event of his death not unlike those who experienced the news of Pearl Harbor, or of Kennedy's assassination, or of Nine Eleven: "...I learned about his death in Calle Sierpes in Seville, when I opened the newspaper as I was having breakfast in the Laredo." He has an obvious fondness for most (but not for all) the writers he gossips about.

WRITTEN LIVES will delight and amuse anyone with a fondness for writers, books, and the creation of literature.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals."--J. Marias, July 16, 2007

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Written Lives (Paperback)

Illustrating this collection of anecdotes about twenty world-famous authors with startling photographs, Javier Marias, one of Spain's most respected contemporary authors, presents individual mini-bios as if they were short stories, "enhancing" some details (though all details are said to be true) and minimizing others. He brings literature's icons to life, showing them with all their warts and blemishes, and though some of these tales have the feel of secret histories, Marias writes with humor, not with bile--and in most cases with actual affection, the three exceptions being James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Yukio Mishima.

Marias's choice of authors is arbitrary. They come from all over the world and reflect a variety of time periods. Lawrence Sterne exists side-by-side with Yukio Mishima and Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad with William Faulkner and Isak Dinesen, Malcolm Lowry with Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde. Here one finds memorable tidbits such as the following from among hundreds of such tidbits:

William Faulkner was fired from working at the University of Mississippi post office because he hated having his reading interrupted: "He told his family that he was not prepared to keep getting up to wait on people at the window and having to be beholden to any SOB who had two cents to buy a stamp." James Joyce was so egotistical that he once asked, "Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the Mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?"

Henry James's "linguistic punctiliousness" was so great that "the simplest question addressed to a servant would take a minimum of three minutes to formulate." Robert Louis Stevenson was fascinated by evil, associating with Chantrelle, a multiple murderer, whom he considered a friend. Ivan Turgenev's grandmother murdered an annoying young servant, and his mother drowned all the babies of the serfs on their estate so that their parents would not neglect their duties. Malcolm Lowry, described as "drunk, drunk, drunk," once told about seeing elephants in the street, a hallucination so ridiculous that his friends would not believe him, even when presented with the steaming evidence on the sidewalk.

A fascinating accumulation of oddities about revered authors, this collection is vibrant in its depictions of their personalities and perceptive in its assessments of how these authors came to be the people they were. Lovers of literary fiction and students of world literature will be delighted by this treasure trove of lesser known facts about the Great Ones. n Mary Whipple

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brightness Falls, February 7, 2006

By 

Charlus "charlus" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Written Lives (Hardcover)

A marvelous series of biographical vignettes on famous writers, each a meticulously crafted essay. These short pieces (most only several pages long) encapsulate a personality far more than it tries to evaluate an entire oeuvre. But in doing so, the reader is privy to a beam of light, briefly but brilliantly illuminating what was once merely a name. As the reader turns the pages, joy piles upon joy and one is left delighted to have spent time in the company of a writer who is both entertaining and enlightening.