The prodigious writer Javier Marías has published 28 novels in Spanish since 1971; translated major English-language writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Laurence Sterne into Spanish; and written more than a thousand newspaper columns and other essays and reviews. We learn this from Alexis Grohmann’s introduction to Between Eternities, a 2018 collection of 48 of those essays on topics from Western films to Venice’s urban geography.
The four essays that I’ll address here are on a cluster of related topics, three about his writing methods and one on antiquarian bookshops.
Beginning with “Dusty Spectacle,” Marías’s essay on used bookshops, I get a sense of how an adept observer can make me see a familiar world through new eyes. I’ve spent more than my share of time in used bookshops of the world, and some of my favourite memories are of adding to my collections from unexpected discoveries in shops from London, England to Bonner’s Ferry in rural northern Idaho. I once spent a week in the tiny village of Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border near Tintern Abbey, entirely devoted to browsing its used bookshops. When I’m not in used bookshops I’m reading about them, like the cantankerously funny diary/memoir of a Scottish bookseller that I finished last month. But until Marías describes “this literary underworld” of used bookshops as “the world in reverse,” I’d never recognized how their scarcity and uniqueness invert the usual offerings of multiple identical copies of a recent bestseller. Marías notes how written dedications make books unique, but with a critical eye for detail; he describes how the obscure writer John Gawsworth “would slap his signature on almost anything in an attempt to up the price of his books.” And he describes two categories of booksellers: those who care too much about their books and have trouble letting them go; and those who “care about everything but the contents of a book.” The result is a portrait of a world where everything seems to invert the conventions outside its doors.
Three related essays then address how Marías practices and conceives of his writing. “Roving with a Compass” describes his writing fiction with a compass rather than a map: with a sense, that is, of immediate circumstances rather than of the whole territory. “I force myself to be ruled by what I have already written, and allow that to determine what happens next.” No wonder Marías has published so much: George R. R. Martin should take note. He even applies this as a philosophy of life: “we cannot behave or decide to choose or act according to a known goal … rather, the goal or subsequent event will have to be ruled by what we have already experienced or known or suffered.” In “Time Machines,” Marías then describes writing on a typewriter rather than on a computer: “what I enjoy about writing is the time it takes,” he says, before describing his process of typing a page and revising it immediately, on paper. The problem with writing on a computer, says Marías, is that the immateriality of their words “means we are more likely to forget them.” All readers can identify with this: consider the difference between a single printed photograph and the thousands that are on your phone. Which are you more likely to remember? Finally, in “The Isolated Writer,” Marías describes how writers create from a feeling of uniqueness, not of belonging to a larger group. You can’t speak for your generation or your nation, he writes, if you’re constantly thinking of yourself in those categories; you must believe that yours will be “the only book in the world,” at least until it’s published and gets shelved and marketed and read alongside other books. The writer “will see it then as just another drop in the ocean, which, like all the other drops, will be doing its best to be noticed.” Only then “we are obliged to accept that such a thing as a zeitgeist does exist, and that we are, involuntarily and unconsciously, at its service.”
