Written Lives
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In these short, capricious and irreverent portraits of twenty-six great writers, from Joyce to Nabokov, Sterne to Wilde, Javier Marías, winner of the Dublin IMPAC prize and author of the bestselling A Heart So White, throws unexpected, and very human, light on authors too often enshrined in the halo of artistic sainthood. Revealing that Conrad actually hated sailing and Emily Brontë was so tough she was known as 'The Major', among many other stories of eccentricity, drunkenness and even murder, this joyful book uses unusual angles and peculiar details to illuminate writers' lives in a new way.
Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The writers whose lives are sketched in this quirky and appealing book by the world-renowned (though less so here) Spanish writer Mar as 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 Mar as 's dry humor and affectionate tolerance for his subjects' eccentricities, but the portrayals of Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Yukio Mishima bristle with Mar as 's disdain. And sometimes the title phrase is tailored to an id e 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 Mar as 's keen and amusing analyses.
