The Spanish writer Javier Marias, whose work has been translated into more than forty languages and in nearly sixty countries, died on Sunday, September 11, in Madrid at the age of 70, announced his publishing house. , Alfaguara, in a statement. “With enormous sadness, on our behalf and on behalf of the family, we regret to announce that our great author and friend Javier Marias passed away this afternoon in Madrid”, writes Alfaguara. The press release states that he suffered “for a few weeks from pneumonia which has worsened in recent hours”. According to the daily El Mundoit was pneumonia “caused by the Covid” and which led to his hospitalization for many months.
Born on September 20, 1951 in Madrid, Javier Marias, considered one of the great authors of contemporary Spanish literature, has published sixteen novels, as well as short stories, essays and countless articles. He grew up in a family of intellectuals. His mother, Dolores Franco, was a professor of literature and his father, Julian Marias, a renowned philosopher and one of José Ortega y Gasset’s closest disciples. “I was a privileged child”he confided in 2013 to the daily ABCaware of having had parents “cultivated” and “fundamentally honest (…), with what are called principles, which is a bit old-fashioned today, but shouldn’t be”.
English restraint and Spanish tragedy
He was only 19 when he published his first novel, Los Dominios del lobo. But he has to wait for his 35th birthday and his fifth book, The sentimental man (1986), to gain recognition from the literary world. will come next The Oxford Novel (1989), which evokes his experience as a professor at the famous British university, then A heart so white (1992), which definitively confirms its success.
Champion of a fiction mixing scholarly precision and endless digression, Javier Marias combined in his books a unique combination of English restraint and Spanish tragedy. All hidden under a black veil where one secret always conceals another, even more unmentionable.
In 2012, the writer triggered a lively controversy in Spain by refusing to receive Like the loves the national prize for narrative literature, awarded by the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy, which he regularly attacks in his articles published in El País. Having previously warned that he would never accept an official award “regardless of the party in power”he also explains that he would be too ashamed to accept a prize never awarded either to his father or to the Spanish novelist Juan Benet, one of his masters.
A member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Language since 2008, he was a movie buff and Real Madrid fan. Despite his republican ideas, he was also the ruler of the fictitious kingdom of Redonda, “title” in front of his name to an islet in the Lesser Antilles.