the great writer and the controversy with women

Javier Maria died. And yes, I have no doubt that the world of Spanish letters is in mourning. In addition to being a storyteller, he was a translator, essayist and member of the Royal Spanish Language Academy. Eternal candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and Knight of the Order of Letters, as well as winner of many very important literary awards, such as the José Donoso, the Formentor of Letters and the Library Lion of the New York Public Library. He has received these numerous awards because he has dedicated his entire life to writing and he has done it with skill and quality. He has sixteen novels to his credit. Tomorrow in the battle think of me, The infatuations, Tomorrow your face (trilogy composed of Fever throws, dances and dreams y Poison and shadow and goodbye) y Thomas Levistonamong others, in addition to short story books, essays and more than one hundred journalistic articles.

Marías has been able to capture the spirit of a Spain that has gone from being depressed after the war, to being freed from Movida, to being a rich and developed country where African and Latin American immigrants arrive in the hope of surviving.

I like reading Javier Marías, why not? In addition to what I mentioned in the previous lines, his work is profoundly universal, it feeds on his many and varied readings. In 2018 I wrote for the Gatopardo magazine on your book Berta Island: “It is a novel in which the literary passions of Marías are sensed, from Shakespeare to Eliot, from Faulkner, Doyle, Melville and Dickens. It is also a tribute to English literature and culture, with its great classics but also with its pop characters, such as James Bond, of which Tomás will observe at one point “there have been other Bonds but the only one, the original , it’s Sean Connery. “The spy in the novel about the most famous British spy in the world. Another flash of humor that Javier Marías masterfully displays.”

It was Javier Marías, the writer. But the views of Javier Marías, the journalist (how to separate one from the other? Is it possible to do this?), When dealing with women and feminism were not so honorable: her column in El País from 11 February 2018 It provoked a series of criticisms for phrases like this, in connection with the emergence of #MeToo: “To give credit to victims for presenting themselves as such is to open the doors to revenge, slander and settling of scores”, or “Now the MeToo movement and others have established two pseudo-truths: a) that women are always victims; b) that women never lie “.

While some friends of Marías, such as fellow writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte They defended him tooth and nailthere were thousands of network users (mostly usersbut also men) that they criticized him from that column, full of irresponsible – to say the least – and misogynistic phrases, to put it in all his letters. For example: “No need to resort to names to remember the considerable number of young and attractive women who have married decrepit men not out of love or sexual desire.”

On 6 May 2022, his journalistic house, Villagepublic an interview what did he do with the book of newspaper articles Will the cook be a good person? that Alfaguara published this year. In that interview, although she states that “at this point everyone is feminist” and that “anyone who is not a halter she has been”, the author of sometimes a gentleman She also warns that “there is a so-called fourth-wave feminism which for me is contrary to classical feminism. They say exaggerated things and nonsense. And above all there is a mistake in that they are dangerously close to the intolerance of the Catholic Church during the Francoist dictatorship ».

With such a “mistake”, Marías refers to the intention to “forbid or fine” obscene glances, and speaks of what he considers an interference with people’s freedom. I have no doubt that the writer has never been the victim of one of those looks that make you change sidewalk in the street and make you accelerate your pace, or make you get off at full speed from the subway car or the city bus you are on.

I have no doubts, how to write the Mexican writer Dahlia de la Cerda, that not all men are potential femicides, and that those who grow up in contexts of high marginalization and violence have everything to lose in terms of equality, freedom, respect and many of the things we demand from feminism. In other words, as Rita Segato also wrote, there are men oppressed by other men, even by white women and by hegemonic social, economic and political strata.

The topic offers a much deeper and more thoughtful discussion, but I, as a reader, prefer the narrator Javier Marías. As a feminist, I can only think that columnist Javier Marías lacked a much deeper analysis before expressing her opinion.