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[NABOKOV-L] Old Sighting: Nabokov in "Written Liv es" byJavier Marías
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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 Marías 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 Marías 's dry humor and affectionate tolerance for his subjects' eccentricities...Reading these portraits is addictive; one keeps turning pages in anticipation of Marías 's keen and amusing analyses. (Feb. 28) Copyright © Reed Business Information
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..
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