{"id":10001,"date":"2022-09-20T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10001"},"modified":"2022-09-19T18:27:43","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T22:27:43","slug":"the-malleability-of-time-javier-marias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10001","title":{"rendered":"The Malleability of Time: Javier Marias"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Award-winning and much-translated Spanish novelist, translator, and short-story writer Javier Marias died September 11 from complications of Covid-19. You have to admire someone as dedicated as Marias, who began seriously writing as a young teenager, and at 17, ran away from home to join his uncle in Paris so he could write his first novel. Despite writing 15 novels and three collections of short stories, he considered himself \u201cmore a reader than a writer,\u201d or so I learned in an interview conducted some years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main characters in his three-volume novel, Your Face Tomorrow<\/a><\/em>, took what could have been a risky path, in that they were based on real people\u2014one of them (even chancier) his own father, including his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and Sir Peter Edward Lionel Russell of New Zealand, Professor of Spanish Studies and Director of Portuguese Studies at Queen\u2019s College, Oxford. Russell also experienced the Spanish Civil War first-hand, on assignment from British Intelligence. He further served the Intelligence Corps of the British Army during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his conversations with the two men, Marias believed they were hopeful the books would be published (they died before the third and final volume appeared). In an interesting way, Marias\u2019s fiction, based however loosely on their own stories, gave them an opportunity to live slightly altered lives Wouldn\u2019t we all like to go back and handle certain people and events differently? \u201cMistakes, I\u2019ve made a few,\u201d sings Sinatra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rethinking one\u2019s history is another example of Marias\u2019s preoccupation with manipulating time, touching it, in order to bring out the important moments that get washed away in the ceaseless flood. In part he has tried to accomplish this by way of numerous digressions. At one point in Your Face Tomorrow,<\/em> a sword is about to fall, and he makes a left turn to talk about different kinds of swords and their history. Meanwhile, the reader is maybe thinking, \u201cenough already. Get on with it.\u201d But Marias believed the experience of what the sword ultimately does is different if readers have those moments of swordly contemplation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m thinking about how much Riku Onda packed into Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight<\/em> which is a novel of moderate length that takes place all in one night and, simultaneously, over decades, as twins review their relationships, their suspicions, and the reasons they cannot keep living together. There\u2019s so much more in there than the highlight reel you\u2019d hear if you asked one of them about that night a year, a month, maybe even a week later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even experimenting with the elasticity of time, it seems Marias was a pantser (writing by the seat of his pants, rather than carefully plotting in advance). He said, \u201cI\u2019m not the kind of writer who knows everything before I start writing a book, or even while I\u2019m writing it.\u201d When he said, \u201cwhat I really like, in a way, is to find a story out.\u201d I think of that as \u201cthe experience of discovery,\u201d and it\u2019s what makes writing exciting for me too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking for something special? My quarterly newsletter contains tips for reading, writing, and viewing. Sign up here<\/a> and receive three prize-winning short stories!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Award-winning and much-translated Spanish novelist, translator, and short-story writer Javier Marias died September 11 from complications of Covid-19. You have to admire someone as dedicated as Marias, who began seriously writing as a young teenager, and at 17, ran away … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Manipulating time and the power of digression. ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Bj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10003,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10001\/revisions\/10003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}