Fernando Marías has died still young; Young, because the 63 years are no longer, in 2022, age of physical decline. And young because his last books, the island of the Father and burns this book, seemed the foundations of a new writer who, in part, refuted the career that Marías had built since the 1990s. The cinephyl novelist, intrigues, fantasies and blows Of effect he had won the Nadal Prize, among others, he had derived from an intimate, confessional and very hard author.
The island of the Father, the first of the books of the new Fernando Marías, included the information to locate the writer. Some data: Marías was born in 1958, at the Ensanche de Bilbao, in a more or less accommodated middle-class family, well-rooted in a house that housed three generations of Marías, from 1913 to 2014. Well-rooted but marked by personality Huidiza de Lorenzo Marías, the father of the writer, a sailor who on the island of Father appeared portrayed as a gentleman in the style of Gary Cooper, partly admirable and partly inscrutable.
In adolescence, Fernando Marías arrived in Madrid to study and with the desire to become film director. It was the 70s, the years of the new Hollywood and the generational rupture. If Marías Father was like Gary Cooper, as a classic Hollywood character, Marías Son was on the Wild Group Wave, Sam Peckinpah, a Western full of expressionist stocks and disruptive characters that the Bilbaín writer once cited as the favorite movie of he.
The reference is relevant. Marías entered adulthood in the years of counterculture plus or less progress, but his paradise was something else, a world in which fantasy, violence, cosmopolitanism and narrative virgoverie weighed more than idealism and seventieter hedonism .
For years, Marías fought for his vocation of filmmaker. Only in the decade of his 30 he found in literature the expression of his creativity. The prodigious light, the first novel of him, appeared in 1991, in tune with the novels that marked those years. With the beltenebros by Antonio Muñoz Molina, for example. In the two novels, almost contemporary, there was history (civil war), classical black film airs, intrigue ... the prodigious light told the history of the survivor of a rifleman who returned to the amnestical life. The investigation in the remains of his life opened a creepy question: and if that poor sounding was Federico García Lorca? Miguel Hermosa adapted the novel to the cinema in 2003 with the Italian Nino Manfredi, Kity Manver and Alfredo Landa in the main roles.
The prodigious light serves to understand some of the keys of that Fernando Marías who won fame in the change of a century: a writer able to give surprising turns to his stories and with intuition to appeal to his time through stories that sometimes came of the past and others were headed at an anachronous time. The Child of the Choroneles, the novel with which he received the Nadal Prize in 2001, was a tyrant novel with infanticides that Marías developed from a biography of Ceaucescu. Tonight I will die (1992) was an intense psychological thriller, something unusual in the Spanish narrative of the time. The woman of the gray wings (2004), was a noir that seemed written in dialogue with Chinatown, from Polanski. 'Invasor' (2003) talked about a Spanish military repatriated from the Iraq war that ended up wrapped in a paranormal intrigue. There is something obviously cinéfilo in every Marías novel. Also in the youth novels of him, the other life of the Bilbaín novelist who won the National Prize for Children and Youth Literature 2006 by Sky Down and the Wide Angle of Youth Literature 2008 are Zara and the Bagdad bookseller.
The interesting thing would be weave the threads that join that bold and ingenious marias and the author of his last books, tucked into the interior, lyrical and suffering. The father's room was a kind of letter to the Tristissum Father but compassionate and reconciliate, an attempt to rebuild a family world lost through the words. Even harder was this book, that of his last book of him. There, Marías portrayed his youth in parallel to Veronica's life, his girlfriend of those years: the Malasaña of the 70s, the delusions of post-teenage grandeur, the romantic alcoholism, the years lost in pedantry and cinephilia ... the Decluding that story was frightening: Veronica was lost in alcohol while Fernando, who had begun in Bohemian life, managed to save himself to carry his memory. Literature was redemption.
Date Of Update: 06 February 2022, 12:25
