The Spanish writer Juan Marsé, narrator of her city, Barcelona, died Saturday at the age of 87, announced on Sunday his literary agency Balcells. “We deeply regret the death of Juan Marsé in Barcelona, January 8, 1933 – July 18, 2020). Rest in peace, dear Juan “, has released his agency on Twitter. “Literature is a settlement of accounts with life” which is rarely as hoped, said this city in the face craggy and look black in turn ironic and melancholic, the author of fifteen novels in nearly sixty years.
one of The most famous, Teresa in the afternoon (1966) the chronicle of a passion transgressive and, finally, calamitous between the son of a poor man who would not be and a student uptown. A work that is unacceptable for Spain puritanical and “national catholic” Francisco Franco, when censorship ruled : “The novel presents different scenes off-color, his background is frankly immoral and there is many mentions of the political character of the left-wing. “A book inspired by his stay in the 1960s in Paris, where he taught courses in conversational Spanish to Teresa, daughter of the pianist Robert Casadesus.
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In another novel written in 1973, Farewell life, farewell love, Marsé introduced a whole history of resistance to anti-franco in Barcelona from 1945 : “A manifesto for the freedom of expression,” according to writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, first award-winning and published in Mexico before being published in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975. “He is a writer and a narrator-born “, said of him, his literary agent Carmen Balcells, who passed away in 2015, to which he had pledged 10 per cent of its ash, it was gone before it…
Winner of the Cervantes prize in 2008
Just after its birth in 1933, his mother died and his father, a chauffeur, offers the new-born baby to a childless couple. The baby is adopted by a nurse and a “dératiseur” cinemas and becomes Juan Marsé Carbo. In the post-civil war, won in 1939 by the national troops of Franco, his adoptive father going into prison as ” red ” (communist) and republican, will tell there. He himself left school at the age of 13 years to become a worker in jewelry : “The need to bring in another salary in the house, I liberated it from a college boring where I learned to sing the Cara al sol [anthem of the far right and dictatorship, ED.]) and the recitation of the rosary “, he said.
At the age of 24 during his military service, he sketches his first novel : sealed with a single toy (1960), centered on a young bourgeois disoriented after the civil war. The worker stage, especially in the literary world that ” almost all writers, at least in Barcelona, were of the bourgeoisie “, he noted. Therefore, it will not stop to rebuild in his novels the popular neighborhood of his childhood, mixing shacks and vacant lots, and often, revive the Barcelona repressed under the dictatorship : republican, to be carried out being secular.
Speaking catalan in the family, he wrote in Spanish, and of course always what he called ” the cultural and linguistic duality of Catalonia “. He harshly criticized the pro-independence movement – which bored her profoundly – like the projection of” a Catalonia which does not exist.” Marsé has received numerous literary prizes, including the Planeta 1978 for The Girl in the underpants of gold. In 2008, at the reception of the Cervantes prize, it was claimed ” love unconditional the fiction “. That, he said, manages to have ” more weight and solidity than the real, more life and more sense “.
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