Written Lives
A Books About Books, Writing, Nonfiction book. As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full...
A heartfelt and very funny gallery of mini-biographies of twenty great world authors.Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover from a remarkable distance away"), Javier Marías has a sharp eye. He casts a long, shrewd, but appreciative look over his cast of great writers. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who in debt and in great pain on his deathbed, ordered up a bottle of champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" William Faulkner, refusing to be "beholden to every son of a bitch with two cents to buy a stamp," is fired from the U.S. Post Office. Marías also considers "the fairly disastrous" lives of Malcolm Lowery, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Lawrence Sterne. Affection glows through Written Lives, evidence, as Marías remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 208 pages
- ISBN: 9780141389271 / 141389273
BJ9hJaeAod-.pdf
More About Written Lives
As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned with what he would write and with his early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: Dont you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life...
i love the ambiguity of truth and fiction in this collection. reminds me of jurassic technology. as intimate a look into marias and his literary passions as much as the subjects he lovingly portrays. Written Lives is extremely readable, mostly interesting and just a little disturbing. Javier Maras is so cunningly selective about the details of the various writers' lives he examines in these brief pieces that the portraits he reveals are quite artfully and quite thoroughly distorted. And speaking of distortion, I must mention Andr... Bir ok gl yazarla ilgili ilgin bilgiler sunuyor. Tanrlatrdmz yazarlar daha "insan" yapyor bu bilgiler. Bu adan ilgin; ama kitap bu yazarlar hakknda temel bir bilgiye sahip olan okurlar iin daha keyifli olacaktr.
