In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most
intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marias 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 Bronte, 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"), Marias 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 Marias
remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this
was the one with which I had the most fun."
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