Written Lives
Douban
Javier Marias translator: Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
overview
Written Lives is a collection of biographies of canonical authors, and making up anything would constitute an act of mischief upon both the reader and literary history as a whole. In fact, the whole project reads like a gentle prank: to treat the greatest writers as if they were short story characters. Marias thankfully has a masterful touch, and his toying with the tradition has a purpose.
Pictures play a major role in Written Lives. Each biography is preceded by a portrait of its subject, and the final chapter of the book is an essay on author photographs. In this essay, Marias describes the "perfect artist." A perfect artist is an artist who both has been photographed and has died.
He admits in his prologue to having failed to generate affection for three men—James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Yukio Mishima.
