‘Hard to believe’ / Venezuela election result met with suspicion abroad

Nicolás Maduro

‘Hard to believe’: Venezuela election result met with suspicion abroad

Nicolás Maduro faces calls to publish transparent breakdown of vote but allies hail his apparent victory

Sam Jones

Mon 29 Jul 2024 12.37 BST

Nicolás Maduro’s apparent re-election as Venezuela’s president has been met with scepticism, suspicion and calls for a transparent and detailed breakdown of the vote in Sunday’s controversial poll.

Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70

Javier Marías

Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70

Marías, also a translator and columnist, was described as ‘one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers’

Sam Jones in Madrid
Sunday 11 September 2022

The Spanish novelist Javier Marías, author of All Souls, A Heart so White, and the epic, three-part Your Face Tomorrow – and a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature – has died at home in Madrid at the age of 70.

Marías, who had been ill with pneumonia for the past month, died on Sunday, according to his publisher, Alfaguara.

“It is with enormous sadness that we regret to inform you that our great author and friend Javier Marías has died in Madrid this afternoon,” the publisher said in a brief statement.

Tributes to Marías, who was also a celebrated translator and columnist, flooded in.

Writing in El País, his friend and fellow writer Eduardo Mendoza said Marías had overcome his early influences to “to find a voice, a subject and a style that were so distinctively his own that they turned him into a strange phenomenon”. He added: “Javier Marías’s writing doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. It’s easy to parody, but impossible to imitate.”

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called Marías “one of the great writers of our time” and said Sunday was “a sad day for Spanish literature”.

The Spanish journalist and writer Rosa Montero said she had been “hit for six” by the news, adding: “For me, he was the best candidate for the Nobel in today’s Spain.”

Javier Marías

Pepa Bueno, the editor in chief of El País, to which Marías was a regular contributor, said: “The death of Javier Marías is so painful. Today is a day of mourning in Spanish literature and column-writing. [He leaves] a huge void in the paper.”

Marías, who was born in the Spanish capital in 1951, published his debut novel, The Dominions of the Wolf, at the age of 20. It was followed by 15 others, among them All Souls, which was inspired by his time teaching at Oxford University, and A Heart So White, a mysterious meditation on love, family and the past that is perhaps his best-known book.

Despite being a member of Spain’s Royal Academy and an international member of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, Marías was not easily impressed with some literary gongs.

He caused a stir in 2012 when he turned down Spain’s €20,000 national narrative prize for his novel The Infatuations. Although he insisted the refusal was not a snub and had been motivated by his lifelong opposition to the way Spain awards state-backed literary prizes, it did not go down well with the organisers.

“All my life I have managed to avoid state institutions, regardless of which party was in government, and I have turned down all income from the public purse,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as an author who is favoured by any particular government.”

Marías also claimed to have spent his entire career improvising for the lack of a literary project.

“But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure,” he once said.

“There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before.”

Earlier this year, when asked by El País what inspired him to write, he replied: “I write about what seems to me to be particularly serious, dangerous, unfair or stupid. Obviously, I sometimes get it wrong or I can go very much against the current.”

THE GUARDIAN

Lost Man Booker Prize / The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

LOST MEN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: The Bay on Noon by Shirley Hazzard

It's hard to know why The Bay of Noon found its way on to the shortlist. She may have written some great books, but this isn't one of them


Sam Jones
Friday 23 April 2010

It's always hard to prove that judges of a literary competition have picked a book because of the reputation of its author rather than its intrinsic worth – but easy to suspect. If I mention Ian McEwan and Amsterdam, I'm sure you'll know what I mean.

It's hard to avoid such speculation with regard to the inclusion of The Bay Of Noon on the Lost Booker shortlist too. Following on from The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire (both winners of several awards, if not the Booker itself), Shirley Hazzard is a writer many take very seriously indeed ("one of the greatest working in English today," according to a quote from Michael Cunningham on the cover of my copy of The Bay Of Noon). And that's the only reason I can imagine a book as inconsequential as this one could have ended up on the shortlist when far better novels haven't.

Set in Naples not long after the end of the second world war, the novel describes the friendship and tangled loves of an Englishwoman called Jenny and two native Neapolitans Gioconda and Gianni. Jenny has been brought to Naples to work in a "big NATO establishment" where she is to do translation and clerical work along with a number of other English girls: "Angelas and Hilarys and Rosemarys who had wanted to get away from Reading or Ruislip or Holland Park… tender, uncherished strokes of pastel."

The trouble is – as Claire Tomalin pointed out in a sharp Observer review back in 1970 – that Jenny is little more than a stroke of pastel herself. Except when she manages to catch jaundice and turn yellow late on in the book, she is singularly colourless. She informs us that she moved to Italy in order to escape an incestuous passion for her brother – but relates it with all the excitement of someone describing a head cold. In Naples meanwhile, she lives vicariously through her friend Giaconda – but we get very little sense of what that means, since Giaconda is herself so thinly sketched out. She has long hair. She lives in an interesting house in a messy bit of Naples. She once wrote a book. Her dad was a lefty. She stays with Gianni even though he's a bully, a womaniser and a bit of a bore. I couldn't tell you much more as there are so few real insights into her personality. Like every other person in the book, you get the impression that if you poked through her papier maché exterior, you'd get nothing but air. Which might be forgivable if she did anything of interest, but aside from a few good bits of back-story about the war there's little more in here than navel gazing and singularly sexless bed-hopping.

There is one character, at least, that does have real life – the city of Naples. The passion that is so lacking in the love stories shines through when Hazzard describes the heat, the warrens of streets, the poverty, the beauty and the strikes among the refuse collectors (that appear to have been as much a problem 60 years ago as they are today). So too does the author's talent. She can trot out nice lines about the long line of time running through this ancient city: "The question 'What is it?' took on, here, an aspect of impertinence; one might only learn what it had successively been." And even better ones about its peculiar charms: "The tourist who comes and sees this shambles, has his camera swiped, is swindled by the taxi drivers and persecuted by old codgers flogging cameos, how can he know all that is just, so to speak, a show of civilities? – the surface pleasantries of a reality which is infinitely worse, unanswerably better?"

But clever as such descriptions are, and although the Naples nostalgia may be heady, they hardly make for a substantial novel. This remains a book that is only really of interest to those keen to track Hazzard's development as a writer. It doesn't deserve to win.

THE GUARDIAN

 ‘I’ve taken pictures of myself naked and even masturbating – I have no shame’ …
García-Alix. Photograph: Alberto García-Alix

Alberto García-Alix's best photograph: self-portrait in a dress made by Elvis

‘Things weren’t good. My liver was in trouble. I’d been told the drugs had to stop’

Interview by Sam Jones
Wednesday 23 August 2017 12.41 BST

I

had a friend called Elvis who made really beautiful knitted clothes. I’d known her since the end of the 1970s, when Spain had just been freed from Francoism and all the drugs began. She had a band and she was really wild – a true character.

Elvis and I ran into each other again in 1999 or 2000 and I said I would shoot her clothes, which were modelled by friends as there wasn’t much money about. Then I decided to put some of them on and take a picture of myself. I was the only man wearing them. I made up my eyes but I didn’t do my hair – and I had a lot more back then. The power in this picture comes from my hands: they’re clenched and that brings a certain violence.

My face is showing no emotion – since that would make it seem staged. I don’t like dramatising faces: I don’t like to weigh down the mask of the face with smiles or whatever. I can see past the clothes and see myself straight away. It’s one of my best self-portraits and I’ve done hundreds. I’ve taken pictures of myself naked or even masturbating. When it comes to my own camera, I have no shame whatsoever.

I started off by taking self-portraits in 1976: it was how I learned to take photographs. At first there was something playful and flirtatious about it, but by the 1990s it had become something more profound – it was an exercise in searching for one’s self. And if I was going to accept myself, a degree of honesty and understanding was required.

Like everyone, I’m a product of my era. I left home when I was 20, in 1976. I was influenced by all the ideas of my time. We nourished ourselves on American counterculture, on British groups, on sexual liberation.

The years 1976 to 1979 were the years of compulsion, agitation, provocation and performance. As with all young people, it was about breaking the conventions. We were keen to move past Francoism and see all of Spain change.

I see other things when I look at the photo now. I see myself back in that moment when things weren’t going well for me. They told me my liver was in trouble; that I had hepatitis C. They told me that I had to give up all the drugs. I took drugs from 1976 to 2002: heroin, a lot of cocaine, I smoked a lot of joints and I drank. A proper addict. Now I just smoke joints. 

I started interferon treatment, which was unbelievably tough and had a lot of side-effects. It wasn’t a very pleasant time but the tensest times can be the most creative. 

This photo has become iconic and gone around the world: China, Germany, Buenos Aires, Paris… People seem to like the strength of it. In fact, I think people like it more than I do. 

• Alberto García-Alix is curating six shows at this year’s PhotoEspaña festival

Alberto García-Alix’s CV

Born: 22 March 1956, Léon, Spain.

Trained: Studied law but self-taught as a photographer.

Influences: “Visits to the Prado with my mother, where I learned composition; the writers Céline, Stendhal, Balzac and Conrad.”

High point: “I feel calm and free when I’m on my motorbike – that’s when I’m happiest. All the rest is just work.”

Low point: “Maybe it was the interferon treatment. But I had to do it to save my life.”

Top tip: “I’m not the right kind of person to give advice, but I know it’s my childlike soul that’s saved me.”

THE GUARDIAN