2023-09-15 21:17:24
by PAOLO LEPRI
The Spanish writer’s novels flourish in a network of references. And in the streets of beloved and hated Madrid his stories come to life. On newsstands on Saturday 16 September the second issue of the series on the author who passed away a year ago: A heart so white
For a year now, Javier Maras has been wandering in the fog – the fog that the wind chases away, as he wrote in Your Face Tomorrow, bidding farewell forever to his beloved father Julin, an anti-Franco philosopher – and lives in an exile from which one must not break away from your name. We wait for him, even if he doesn’t come. The shutters of his window, once always lit and fogged up by cigarette smoke, are irreparably closed.
It is impossible to meet him walking around Madrid – the city where he was born, lived and worked – on the routes he chose every day when leaving his home in Plaza de la Villa. He had bought himself a big black hat, of which he was very proud. He seemed like one of the spies in his novels, hidden men who must anticipate the intentions of others, just like a novelist, who takes risks, because he too cannot justify knowing what he knows. The insoluble mystery of fiction, a mystery that literature, he said, has the great virtue of showing, not explaining.
The solitary walk, similar to those of Robert Walser, often reached its destination in the garden of the Prince of Anglona, where the former agent Toms Nevinson and the sinister Bertram Tupra – head of a branch of the British secret service and later the great puppeteer of the group that interprets lives – they begin to discuss the new mission of Berta Isla’s husband who has been torn from life for too long. Here Maras often stopped on the same bench where, in his latest novel, a mysterious woman sits reading Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand, perhaps sent there to control the situation by Tupra herself: a tribute to a real person, her closest collaborator. close and faithful, Mercedes Lpez-Ballesteros, translator of Proust. Among those brick paths, arranged in a fishbone pattern, there is always a peace that contrasts with the city hell he often fought against in the weekly articles for El Pas.
No one will meet the author of All Souls not even in the Plaza de la Encarnacin, a few steps from the house on Calle de Pava where Berta waits for Toms for years and years, until a different man, a survivor of brutal actions, rings her doorbell. and takes off his cap, showing his balding forehead. You don’t recognize me, do you? He doesn’t surprise me, I barely recognize myself too, he tells her. Here, in this beautiful square, in front of the baroque Augustinian convent, the ritual involved the lighting of one of the many cigarettes to be consumed throughout the day. Otherwise the path could have been different, perhaps following in reverse the path that Jaime Deza still travels in Your Face Tomorrow, starting from the Prado museum, to follow Custardoy, the lover of his wife or ex-wife Luisa: a bit the same woman or almost (Maras’s books are also a system of correspondences, in which the plots that sometimes intertwine are animated by what has been called literary thought) married by the protagonist of A Heart So White That He Would Never Want to Know Father Ranz’s atrocious secret.
No more furtive outings, in short, no more pranks with his closest friends – first of all Antonio Prez-Reverte, author of novels very different from his own, and the director Augustn Daz Yanes – in the spirit of the Kingdom of Redonda, whose motto Ride yes sapis, it was sculpted by his wife Carme Lpez Mercader – who lived in Barcelona – on the black tombstone half hidden in the ancient cemetery of San Isidro, not far from the flow of the Manzanares. The people who have known us since our youth, she had said, are like air, because you need that contact and that relationship to breathe. With them, cheerfulness was the rule, a subtle cheerfulness that burst with intelligence.
Joy and sadness. Precisely the fact that in an interview with the Corriere which now publishes this beautiful and complete series of his works (the second title, A heart so white on newsstands today), already in February 2019, Maras confessed to being looking for a successor to the scepter of the Caribbean island that became a semi-imaginary independent nation, of which he was the sovereign with the name of Xavier I (and the writer had received honorary citizenship), sounds today like a sort of premonition about the brevity of life . Last summer, a few months before his death, he seemed almost disarmed in the face of the domination of poor health. One of his favorite themes is the wounds of time in the man who knows himself to be mortal, as Elide Pittarello, scholar and editor of his literary production, observes in the prologue to the Spanish edition of The Sentimental Man. But the interminable trace that the dead leave always accompanies us. this is one of the few certainties in the unknowability of the world. Another certainty is that his books translated into dozens of languages, lined up in the corridor of the house in Plaza de la Villa in columns resting on the floor, are now even higher than the ceiling, they pass and fly through the walls.
On newsstands
On the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Javier Maras (Madrid, 20 September 1951 – Madrid, 11 September 2022), Corriere della Sera launches a new initiative, bringing his complete work to newsstands, in collaboration with the Einaudi publishing house. After the first volume, the novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me, published in Spain in 1994 and translated by Glauco Felici, today it’s the turn of A Heart Cos White, which appeared in Castilian in 1992 and was translated by Paola Tomasinelli for Einaudi 7 years later . The price of each volume is 9.90 euros plus the daily newspaper and the publication frequency will be weekly. The series will include 18 titles. Next week Cos begins evil, from 2014 (translation by Maria Nicola). The graphic design of the covers signed by XxYstudio. Javier was the son of the philosopher Julin Maras Aguilera (1914-2005). He had graduated in English Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid, had taught Spanish literature for two years at Oxford and held courses at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, before obtaining the chair of Theory and Translation at the Complutense University of Madrid. As a narrator he had a very early debut, in 1971 at the age of 19, with Los dominos del lobo. Maras won the Reading quality ranking in 2018 with Berta Isla, a novel that forms a diptych with the subsequent Toms Nevinson: in February 2019 he collected the award signed by the artist Vasco Vitali and created at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in Milan.
September 15, 2023 (modified September 15, 2023 | 9.13pm)
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