Thursday, October 25, 2012

Spanish National Literature Award for Javier Marías


The writer and scholar Javier Marías (Madrid, 1951) has won the Premio Nacional de Literatura [National Literature Award] in the "Narrative" section for his novel The Infatuations, to be published in the English version on March 7, 2013. This prize affirms the novel's double success - among the reading public and the critics - since its publication in Spanish 18 months ago. The award is endowed with 20.000 EUR and awarded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports to the best work of narrative published in 2011 in one of Spain's four official languages: Castilian, Galician, Basque, and Catalan.
The newspaper El País's literary supplement Babelia nominated The Infatuations Spain's book of the year 2011. On that occasion fellow writer and friend of Marías', Eduardo Mendoza, wrote: "[The novel] appears to have been written without any external or internal pressure, with absolute liberty, one of the clearest and fullest of its author, ... Only thus can be explained that he could adopt without any apparent effort or artifice a feminine voice and keep it up without fissures over 400 pages."
The novel does not talk about love but about infatuations, its state and states, and how this can "contaminate" a person. There are present various of Marías' regular topics: chance or luck, the search for truth in everyday questions, betrayal and its sequels, appearances, the things left unspoken, the memory and the presence of the deaths and their influence on the living. 
The Infatuations is Marías' novel number 11, or 13 if one counts every volume of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy independently. In it, Marías uses a female narrator for the first time. It comes after the just mentioned trilogy, finished in 2007. At that time, the fatigued writer thought he would not write anything else. But then emerged María Dolz, the narrating character and what looked to become a short novel turned out a 401-page volume in its Spanish version (352 in the English hardcover version).
As usual, according to Mendoza, "Marías does not write in a lineal or orthodox manner: he scatters the text so that the narration does not flow through cleanly drawn channels but through a natural riverbed, uneven, in which there are meanders, swirls and overflows; without ever loosing neither the direction nor the discourse's ultimate control. This mix of chaos and rigor requires an enviable mastery of the narrative technique, as demonstrated by the use of the measured anacoluthon as a literary recourse, that shocks teachers and inspectors, but that reflects so well reality's perception on the go; a precipitated perception, as sagacious as it is contradictory, and in which intervene intelligence, emotions, prejudices and limitations in a complementary and antagonistic manner." 
Marías revises these days the covers of the novel's editions in Norwegian, Finnish and English, that will all keep the image of the Spanish original.

[This is an unofficial translation of most of Winston Manrique Sabogal's article published on Oct. 25, 2012, in El País.com]
Marías does not accept any awards by state institutions, parties, etc. as he does not want to be seen as "tainted" by any political party, power, etc.  What is more, he opposes the current goverment's cuts in its cultural programs.

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