The author of 15 novels, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize, and the most recent King of Redonda, the Spanish writer was an acute observer of the games we all play
• Novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70 – news
Perhaps because Javier Marías felt deeply the absurdity of everyday life and had the sense that history is a game played out with dreadful consequences, he became interested in two pursuits that echo our witless absurdity: the art of spying and the craft of writing fiction. Of the first he became a canny investigator and observer, of the second a talented practitioner. Fifteen novels and several collections of short stories testify to these two lifelong interests, and his success can be measured in the enthusiasm of the reading public who eagerly sought out his books, published in close to 50 languages.
Of course, the world of spies was not his only interest: he enjoyed dissecting the games of academia, the tangles of erotic strategies, the gossipy realm of writing and publishing. But the spy story above all allowed Marías to explore the consequences of our playing games with each other. Whatever story he chose to tell was for him merely a starting point: the reader had to do the rest. “Once you’ve finished a novel,” says one of his characters in The Infatuations, “what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”
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