Some of the voices essential to the narrative as a chilean, Germán Marín, died Sunday, December 29 at age 85 in a hospital in Santiago de Chile. Of strong character, as his own work, was a narrator especially interested in the uncomfortable zones of recent history, about which he never ceased to write from that in 1994 –already at the age of 60– published vicious Circle, the first novel of his trilogy History of an absolution family. The likes of firms such as José Donoso, Manuel Rojas and Carlos Droguett, the thirty or so novels, stories and autobiographical texts, their authorship make up a production that has been described as bold and vigorous. With a style heavily influenced by the spaniard Juan Benet, whom I admired very much, Marin was, moreover, a kind of consciousness literary for tens of chilean writers of younger generations who paved the way, and that in these hours of mourning his death.
“he was scratching at the painful places of the memory”, described by his friend, the poet and editor, Matias Rivas. “It was the wrong type, was not affiliated to the fashion. Had No major grumbling in expressing his opinions. It was for the parody and not to swallow ideologies of a sudden. It was of those who do not kowtow to the head of the political institutionality of any kind, which had a high price,” says Rivas in reference to what is considered one of the great injustices with his work: Marin never got to receive the National Prize for Literature. I wrote to purpose of the death of chilean poet Raúl Zurita: “1,600 pages that make up the Story of an absolution family make this novel the most emphatic written by a chilean in the last century, and its author, someone who deserved the highest awards that a State stingy as ours, not given”. Zurita is declared ashamed of being a national award in a list that without Marin “is spurious and clumsy”.
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At the Military School had instructor to Augusto Pinochet, and then to change the weapons for the letters, he learned from Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. He published his first novel, Fireworks shortly before the 1973 coup, and the entire edition was burned by the new regime. Broke his exile in Mexico, where he worked in TWENTY-first Century Publishers and began to collaborate with Gabriel García Márquez in the writing of speeches, statements, and catalogs. Soon, however, he settled in Barcelona, where it flourished as an editor from Editorial Work and Seix Barral. It was the time that Martin wrote the Story of an absolution family, with which he would return to Chile under the arm at the time of the return to democracy in 1990. By his forcefulness, this trilogy usually compared to The obscene bird of night, Donoso.
In Chile, he returned to the issue in large companies, such as South american, and Random House Mondadori, where “I was going to look for the books I wanted to read and did not expect it to reach the desktop”, as described by the writer Rafael Gumucio, who pushed for 20 years to publish Memoir premature. Meanwhile, Marin published fundamental works of the narrative of the chilean of the last 25 years, like The palace of laughter, where he reconstructs the history of detention and torture center of the regime of Pinochet, Villa Grimaldi. “It is a book key to understanding the dictatorship and the political violence that marks the history of Chile”, explains Diego Zúñiga, chilean writer. “I had an obsession to be explored in recent memory, which led him to enter uncomfortable zones and dark”, adds the author of Camanchaca. His judgment is categorical: “Marin next to Roberto Bolaño are the two chilean writers more potent in terms narrative of the last decades and, therefore, it is striking that your unique project remains a secret, outside of Chile,” he concludes.
he Was a young writer of the decade of the sixties, installed in the nineties and 2000, analyzes Gumucio, who warns that in the extensive work of Marin there are elements that seem to premonitorios. “The start of Ídola [a novel of worship in Chile, the darkest of his work] speaks of a walk through Santiago completely destroyed. Although it was published in 2000, portrays a city as we see today, in 2019,” says the writer in reference to the state of the chilean capital in the framework of the social protests. “Many of his books talk about issues that could explain the outbreak. Many elements of the political violence, desperate, without much direction, is told in several novels of Marin. Noted long before this kind of carnival, a bit violent and at the same time fun,” says Gumucio. Because he warns: “To Marin fun of the disaster, not worried at all. Many of his characters portray this new Chile that does not believe in anything or in anyone.”
the death of The author complex than it avoided both the heroes as the idealizations of other times it has been lamented from all strata of chilean culture. Is no coincidence that the year ends with a denouement very sad for the literature and will begin with the indelible mark that it leaves Marin in his innumerable notebooks written always to hand, her steps like a bear, and his cavernous voice.
