As corny as Kansas in August? A Spanish writer's portraits of VN
& others
Written Lives New Directions: 200 pp., $22.95
By Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
Joseph Conrad "wore a monocle and disliked poetry," hated Fyodor
Dostoevsky, loved cigarettes and his yellow-and-white striped bathrobe.
Isak Dinesen didn't live on a diet of oysters and champagne (which
doesn't mean the rest of us can't); she also ate "prawns, asparagus,
grapes, and tea." Robert Louis Stevenson once set fire to a tree by
accident, then ran away as the entire forest burned. In "Written
Lives," Javier Marías weaves thousands of glittering bits into the most
gorgeous portraits, each two to five pages long. His only criteria in
choosing 26 writers from around the world was that they be dead, for
although nothing in these essays is invented, several are
"embellished."
Marías adds his interpretations: "There is about the figure of Robert
Louis Stevenson a touch of chivalry and angelic purity, which, if taken
too far, can verge on the cloying." Each is titled like a painting:
"Ivan Turgenev in His Sadness," "Thomas Mann in His Suffering," and "Nabokov
in Raptures." All, for the most part, are very funny. (The vision of
Giuseppe Lampedusa with his satchel of teacakes and books all mashed
together, dressed so elegantly, is indelible.)
Susan
Salter Reynolds
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."