![\"Javier](\"http:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/im2\/javiermarias.jpg\")
Detail of R. Kipling’s hand on the cover of book “Written Lives”<\/p>\nJavier Detail of R. Kipling’s hand on the cover of book “Written Lives”<\/p>\n
“The Man Who Would be King” was the favorite book of both Faulkner and Proust, so we learned from Javier Marias.<\/p>\n
28 snippets of writer’s lives are told according to this author with a mixture of affection and humor, except for three; Joyce, Mann and Mishima, who took themselves too seriously. <\/p>\n
“The idea, then, was to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Words and Meaning<\/a>:<\/p>\n
“Spanish writer Javier Marias’s parallel career as a translator taught him how to be a novelist, he tells Aida Edemariam.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Marias has said that “in the intellectually mediocre country I grew up in, in which everyone thought Franco was eternal, people like me took shelter in the movies. The American pictures of the ’40s and ’50s were our stimulation”.<\/p>\n
The summer he was 17, Marias saw 85 films in six weeks. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
J. Marias described Laurence Sterne<\/a> whose novel he has translated thus “He was a kindly, easy-going man, who once tried to “inherit” two children left behind by a poor widow on her death” ” He included a few pages speaking against slavery in the later volumes of Tristram Shandy.”<\/p>\n
(Note: Tristram Shandy<\/a> is now adapted into a film<\/a> recently).<\/p>\n
“As of Nobakov, he is a joker who prefers not to aknowledge this openly, which is why his expression is one of passion and discovery. ” <\/p>\n
Djuna Barnes in Silence – “in her youth when she worked as a journalist, it was the activity to which she devoted most of her time – well, that and maintaining prolonged silences. Her silences were both written and verbal. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The rest of edited excerpts are found here.<\/a><\/p>\n
“This habit of choosing is central to the kind of writer Mar\u00edas has become, and explains much of what is unique about his work: he has made indecision\u2014the space between two alternatives\u2014the center of his stories. And this indecision is conveyed in the equivocations and qualifications of the narrative voice.” (A MAN WHO WASN\u2019T THERE<\/a> The clandestine greatness of Javier Mar\u00edas. by WYATT MASON – from the New Yorker)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Two entire essays are online.
\nWilliam Faulkner on Horseback<\/a><\/p>\nGiuseppe Tomasi di Lampadusa in Class<\/a>
\nVisconti adapted Lampadusa’s novel “The Leopard”<\/a> <\/a>starring Burt Lancaster as the Sicilian nobleman with Alain Delon and Claudio Cardinale. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n