Written Lives - Tapa blanda

An artful anecdote to the 'exhaustive and futile erudition' of biography...Mann, Mishima, Joyce and Rilke get short damning shrift. Marias sups from the marrow of their bones with a very long spoon. * * The Times * * Javier Marias is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length, as he carves into the quick of around 30 reputations, in these brief, but far from hasty thumbnail sketches of writers who, for better or worse, largely make up the canon of western literature... One by one, with very few exceptions, most of these "greats" are subjected to close and unflinching examination, and almost nobody comes out out it well... * * The Scotsman * * Curious, addictive and profound * * Guardian * * Brief, playful, charming and insightful -- Alan Chadwick * * Metro * * [Marias is] one of the best contemporary European writers. -- JM Coetzee

From Rudyard Kipling to James Joyce, Emily Bronte to Vernon Lee and Henry James to Joseph Conrad, Written Lives throws a new and fascinating light upon these well-known literary figures. Inspired to revisit the lives of some of the world's most eminent writers of all time, looking at them from the angle of some peculiar detail of their lives, Javier Marias provides a lively and illuminating insight into personalities we thought we knew everything about. Told with affection and humour, these brief 'written lives' throw a refreshing, and very human, light on authors too-often enshrined, or entombed, within the halo of artistic sainthood.