He renounced any prize or reward with public money and had many controversies with colleagues and journalists
His absolute independence from public affairs prompted Javier Marías to renounce any prize awarded by any body of the administration. It wasn’t just any ad with a propaganda function:_when the National Narrative jury awarded him the prize in 2012, he turned it down. «I have always said that I would never receive an institutional award (…)_I have rejected every compensation that came from the treasury». And that led him not to give lectures or courses at universities or other official centers and, of course, to be excluded from prizes in which he would have been a big favorite, such as the Cervantes.
This unusual distancing from the public sphere — even more unusual in an industry that is always asking for help — prompted him not to go to lunchtime invites with politicians (“the normal thing is they are extremely friendly and then criticism is harder”, he said) or for visits to the Moncloa. “When a prime minister calls intellectuals, it’s usually to show that he’s listening and probably to hang them up for decoration. And I’m not here to play anyone’s medal,” he said in an interview with this newspaper.
That fierce independence also led him to say goodbye to publishing house Anagrama and its founder/director Jorge Herralde – who had brought him to fame – but not before accusing the label of being made up of ” ignorant squatters”. The divorce was complex and it took the novelist a long time to regain the rights to the novels published by that label.
But the most infamous lawsuit was against the producer Elías Querejeta and his daughter, the director Gracia Querejeta, for the film adaptation of the novel ‘Todas las almas’, set in Oxford and brought to the screen with the title ‘Robert Rylands’. last trip. Released in 1996, the film so disfigured the novel, according to the author, that he requested that all mentions of him and the book be removed from the credits. The judicial process ended with the Supreme Court giving him the reason ten years later, after going through all the intervening courts.
Although he was not on social networks (the webpage under his name and the twitter account were not controlled by him;_in fact he didn’t even own a computer and wrote his novels by type), he was no stranger to a good handful of controversies in which he brought forth that righteous character by which he defined himself. He attacked Cela when he already monopolized all major and minor prizes in universal literature. He also did it to Juan Manuel de Prada, whom he accused of copying entire paragraphs from one of his books to include in ‘La tempestad’, the work with which the author of Baracaldés won the Planet in 1997.
And it was against Antonio Burgos because he wrote an article mocking Antonio Muñoz Molina’s father for – in his opinion – how badly he wore the suit at his son’s inaugural ceremony at the Royal Academy. Marías, who confessed not to be friends with the novelist from Úbeda, literally destroyed the columnist. Then, already in the days of social networks, the most radical right and the most ancient left often attacked him. Of course he didn’t care. As the writer José Antonio Montano has also noted, his “happy lucidity” or “the old pleasure of being a party animal was.”
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
