Javier Marias

It's quite some time since I've read Latin American literature. The book I'm reading presently is  When I Was Mortal, by the Spanish author Javier Marias. But the experience one has reading Javier Marias is similar to reading Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano, or so to say. Their writing, particularly Bolano's is mindblowing. I read in the Melville House website that of his Spanish contemporaries, Bolano was impressed by the literature of Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Marias.

When I was Mortal is a collection of twelve stories. Most stories are comical and startling. Of them, eleven were commissioned. Now, Marias does not believe sentimental purists who say that "in order to sit down in front of the typewriter, you have to experience grandiose feelings such as a creative "need" or "impulse", which are always "spontaneous" or terribly intense". He argues, in the Author's Foreword, that majority of the sublime works of art produced over the centuries -especially in painting and music -were the result of commissions or of even more prosaic or servile stimuli.

It's worth pondering, writes Sam Sacks in his review of Thus Bad Begins in The Wall Street Journal., why Javier Marias has never received the acclaim in the U.S.that he enjoys in Europe. 

"Why isn't he as renowned as genre-benders like Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami?"