Marias uses fact to create portraits of famous authors
By Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times
Joseph Conrad "wore a monocle and disliked poetry," hated Fyodor Dostoevsky, loved cigarettes and his yellow-and-white striped bathrobe. Isak Dinesen didn't live on a diet of oysters and champagne (which doesn't mean the rest of us can't); she also ate "prawns, asparagus, grapes, and tea." Robert Louis Stevenson once set fire to a tree by accident, then ran away as the entire forest burned.
In "Written Lives," Javier Marias weaves thousands of glittering bits into the most gorgeous portraits, each two to five pages long. His only criteria in choosing 26 writers from around the world was that they be dead, for although nothing in these essays is invented, several are what should be deemed "embellished."
Marias adds his interpretations: "There is about the figure of Robert Louis Stevenson a touch of chivalry and angelic purity, which, if taken too far, can verge on the cloying." Each is titled like a painting: "Ivan Turgenev in His Sadness," "Thomas Mann in His Suffering," and "Nabokov in Raptures." All, for the most part, are very funny. (The vision of Giuseppe Lampedusa with his satchel of teacakes and books all mashed together, dressed so elegantly, is indelible.)