Written Lives by Javier Marias
"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
Editorial Review 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 Marķas are familiar to any avid reader: Oscar Wilde, Henry
James, Djuna Barnes...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 Marķas 's dry humor and affectionate tolerance for his subjects'
eccentricities...Reading these portraits is addictive; one keeps turning pages
in anticipation of Marķas 's keen and amusing analyses. (Feb. 28) Copyright ©
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Customer reviews:
Master of Gossip, March 4, 2006 ,by By Fernando
Melendez: Gossip has had a bad rap: it has been made out to be an inferior order
of communication, petty and vindictive...Gossip can be, and often is, the magic
key that opens a person's soul for all to view. Javier Marias's WRITTEN LIVES is
superbly gossipy. Its subject is a group of 20 writers...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 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."
Mary Whipple: 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...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...
Shalom Freedman: I have read the hype about these
portraits, and I do not buy it. Most of what Marias gives us here is petty
little things about great creators which aims to cut them down to less..