This article is published in number 12 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 23, 2021
He has just published his new novel in Spain. To his colleague who questions him, he says that talking about himself bores him and that, having given hundreds of interviews, perhaps this will be the last. He says he wrote this novel in the months of hardest confinement, and that writing it was a kind of refuge. Then he says that life is largely made up of what is hidden from us and that we ourselves hide. It is determined by the difficulty, if not impossibility, of deciphering others. Their secrets, their sadness, their joys, their regrets, their ambitions, often destined to remain unfinished. He says our life is basically like a spy novel. And the novelist is the most committed to spying of all. So it is a pity, he says, if today we are inundated with simplistic novels or films, which tell us who to judge, who to condemn, who to pity. In any case, no trace will remain. Because life is more complex and ambiguous, it continually poses moral dilemmas to us, and no one can give us an instruction manual. He does not like people who do not know how to doubt, people who are schematic, unable to grasp the contradictions and inconsistencies in the positions they themselves take. True literature is a good training in not rejecting the nuances, the cracks. To accept the fact that we are all in dim light. As a writer, he comes to terms with that dim light. Writing novels, he says, is like setting a second brain in motion. The first is the one who stays with you all the time and often ends up tormenting you. The second is immersed in the story you tell, to the point of overcoming all the setbacks, personal interference, the noise of the time. It is the brain of another, of a double. And even if Javier MarÃas is written on the cover of the books, it’s as if it wasn’t his.
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