In the death of Javier Marías: what we will never know

Javier Marías, photographed at his home in Madrid in 2021. Daniel Ochoa de Olza

For several years, the first years of this century, there was a fax machine in my house that had only one purpose: my communication with Javier Marías.

We had met by fax, which is how I interviewed him in 2000, and the conversation continued through that medium many years after we met in person.

Our dialogues were made up of the letters I wrote to him and the comments he made in the margins —for example, about the injustice of

having the consideration he has, when,

Faulkner had done more important things—or with short paragraphs of well wishes if something lucky happened to a book of mine.

Later, when he accepted the existence of email, he started scanning his letters and sending them as attachments;

but he never stopped writing on his usual old typewriter, which for many of his acquaintances was a whim or an eccentricity, but which I saw as an inseparable part of his creative method, and the reason why his loss seems to me a irreparable damage.

More information

Javier Marías, key writer of Spanish literature, dies

Marías did not write a story that he had discovered or planned in advance, but he was figuring it out as he went along.

What was going to happen on the future page was determined by what had happened on the past ones;

and what had happened in the past, being typewritten, was impossible to change or correct.

Which is the same (she liked to say) that happens in life.

(Nobody has to point out to me, as I point out pointlessly long ago, that typing also allows anyone to go back to change or correct.) Marias used many metaphors to explain what interested him, and they are all eloquent.

She sometimes said that some write with a map and others with a compass: he, of course, was one of the latter, because in writing he knew that he was heading north,

but he did not know what he would discover on the way.

She liked a Faulknerian idea: writing is like striking a match in a dark field: not everything is illuminated, but enough for us to realize the size of the darkness.

Finally, he liked the idea that there are tools of knowledge, but literature is

: “It is a way of knowing that you know what you didn't know you knew,” as he wrote in an essay from the 1990s.

“The literature that I am interested in reading –and therefore trying to write– is very varied.

But everything participates in that: it does not count what is known, but what is only known and at the same time ignored.

Or, in fewer words: without being able to explain it, it tells the mystery”.

For 24 years of my life as a reader, since the hallucinated reading I did in 1998 of

and

, Marías's novels have given me access to that mystery.

In them I have known corners of our human experience that no one else has ever told me, that no one has been able to illuminate to make them understandable as he has done.

The same thing, I suspect and have found, has happened to legions of readers everywhere.

What is lost when a novelist of his stature dies is a way of seeing the world and of thinking about it: it is as if a door were closed and someone took the key, leaving us strangely locked up, in a reality that is poorer or narrower.

The correspondence we had and the times we saw each other will be an irreplaceable privilege for me;

but I prefer, now that the news of his death reaches me, to say only that he was one of the greatest novelists of our time in any language, but that he honored ours,

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber