Spanish novelist, translator and columnist Javier Marías, "a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature," died September 11, the Guardian reported. He was 70. Marías "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." Other works include Dark Back of Time; Tomás Nevinson; Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me; The Infatuations; When I Was Mortal; Thus Bad Begins and Berta Isla.
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. 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."
Simon Prosser, Hamish Hamilton publishing director, told the Bookseller that Marías was "a truly superb and original writer with a voice entirely of his own; a master of the elegant, sinuous, always surprising sentence; a poet of the comma--the pause that isn't an end; and an essayist of rare intelligence, wit and insight, with a weekly column in El País.... He was one of the greats of contemporary literature, constantly tipped for the Nobel, which sadly, like W.G. Sebald, with whom he is often compared, he never won. A bestseller in Spain as well as other European countries, he was also an immensely popular writer among readers. And for good reason: once hooked, it is very hard to put a book by Marías down.... I will miss him deeply, both as a writer and as a person."
In a Guardian tribute, author Alberto Manguel wrote: "Perhaps because Javier Marías felt deeply the absurdity of everyday life and had the sense that history is a game played out with dreadful consequences, he became interested in two pursuits that echo our witless absurdity: the art of spying and the craft of writing fiction. Of the first he became a canny investigator and observer, of the second a talented practitioner. Fifteen novels and several collections of short stories testify to these two lifelong interests, and his success can be measured in the enthusiasm of the reading public who eagerly sought out his books, published in close to 50 languages."
"Between 2002 and 2007, Marías embarked on his magnum opus: the monumental trilogy under the title Your Face Tomorrow, his approach to the Spanish Civil War through an incident inspired by the denunciation of his father, a philosopher and disciple of José Ortega y Gasset," El País reported. "Imprisoned as a Republican sympathizer, Julián Marías was forbidden from teaching at universities during the Franco regime for refusing to sign his name to the principles of the Nationalist movement. That forced him to make regular trips to the United States to be able to lecture and as such Javier Marías spent the first year of his life in Massachusetts, near Wellesley College, where his father was a visiting professor."
In a prologue added to the 50th anniversary commemorative edition of The Wolf's Domains, Marías observed that, in answer to the frequent question of why he wrote, he tended to reply half in jest: "So I don't have to suffer a boss and I don't have to wake up early or work fixed hours." He also noted that the office of a writer was not "the best way for a lazy person to spend his life.... Sometimes I put my head in my hands, conscious as I am that every page has been patiently written and re-written, always on paper and typewriter, with corrections done by hand and then typed out again." For years, Marías believed "I will not live long, who knows why." What he never imagined then, he said, was that the "almost childish game" of writing would lead him to "work so much."