Anti-Climacus

In my spare time, such as it is these days, I have been reading and enjoying the work of Javier Marías, particularly Your Face Tomorrow. Marías is in the tradition of very-long-sentence-writers, and so nothing if not a kindred spirit to your humble blogger. Your Face Tomorrow in particular gets frequently compared to Proust, about whom I know very little, and so I can't comment on whether the comparison is fair. But he does have the Spanish-language tendency to mix in genre with literary fiction (Your Face Tomorrow is clearly on the genre side, but as I have mentioned on Facebook, I'm approximately 450 pages in and only sort of certain it's a spy novel; there's a lot of lit fiction in the spaces between the plot), and the very characteristic Spanish tendency to mix history with fiction until separating truth from imagination is a foolish task. Excellent stuff. Him in the Paris review:

INTERVIEWER

Another common quality among the writers you profile is that they didn’t take themselves too seriously. The notable exceptions are Thomas Mann, Joyce, and Mishima. How do you avoid taking yourself too seriously?

MARÍAS

It’s not a matter of avoiding it. Either you have a feeling that you are important and that you are going to be remembered, or you do not. Those three seemed to consider themselves very important and to think very much of their posterity. There is a poem by Stevenson that I translated many years ago in which he calls writing “this childish task.” In the poem he addresses his ancestors, all of whom built lighthouses. He apologizes for not having followed the tradition and for staying at home and playing with paper like a child.
To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long. Now more than ever, we depend on the mercy of the living. When writers and filmmakers die there are three or five days during which, with any luck, the newspapers and the TV devote pages and programs. There is a big fuss, but then you have to wait ten years until there is a commemoration. The moment you are not here to defend your work in interviews, you literally do not exist. There is a penalty.
Of course, some people are lucky with posterity, or they deserve it. Elvis Presley has been lucky. He is on the minds of many people, including my own, very often. I think Elvis Presley deserves to be remembered very often. But for most, it is not like that. On Faulkner’s centenary, I made a small volume, a tribute to him, with a few texts I had written, the poems I had translated, and a text by someone else. The booklet made people from the press take an interest in Faulkner. When they called and asked me about him, I had the feeling that a mediocre writer like myself was doing Faulkner the favor of talking about him. I am not trying to be falsely modest—you always have your heroes and you never will surpass them, never. So, from my point of view, thanks to a mediocre Spanish writer—me—and because of the accidental fact that I was alive and well known, people in Spain read Faulkner. But Faulkner should not need favors from anyone.