The writer Fernando Marías dies

A cinephile since he was a child, he wanted to be a film director. He left his native Bilbao – a city, at that time, dark and dirty – to study Image in Madrid of “the scene, alcohol, sex and wild nights”. He set up his own production company and wrote scripts, but the world of movies was not good for him. In return, triumphed in literature, a world that dazzled him because, unlike the cinema, there were no schedules or telephone numbers. After an award-winning career in literature (she won the Nadal, the Primavera and the Biblioteca Breve, among others), Basque writer Fernando Marías died yesterday in Madrid.

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Marías, brother of the director and screenwriter Luis Marías, was 64 years old and a staunch defender of culture as a social weapon. He leaves as a legacy intimate books in which he strips naked as a writer. ‘La isla del padre’, for example, is an attempt to capture and reconstruct the figure of an absent father, a merchant seaman by profession, a man who studied and fought to change his life and be able to endure six months in the grayness of Spain. Francoist and six others opening up to the world and traveling to Beirut or Baghdad. To write the book – a few days after the death of his father, in 2013 – he returned to the house where he spent his childhood, in Bilbao. He had more comfortable tables, but he decided to write on the folding table where he studied when he was a child. Memories surfaced prodigiously. ‘La isla del padre’ won the Biblioteca Breve award.

Faithful to the maxim that you have to write about what you know and know, the Basque writer captured in literature his terrible relationship with alcohol, which caused him to collapse and almost killed him. In ‘Arde este libro’ narrates the intense love story with Verónica for almost three decades. He pushed her into alcohol – she didn’t drink before she met him – and everything turned into hell. He survived her addiction, but she died of alcoholism when they had already separated. Guilt became part of the tragedies of her life. As soon as he finished the book, he went back to see one of the films that marked him when he was very young: ‘Days of wine and roses’, in his opinion, a masterpiece that really explores what alcohol means, with an addict Jack Lemmon unable to save his wife. It was one of the films of his life, along with ‘Wild Pack’, by Sam Peckinpah. He saw her in a cinema in Lekeitio when he was 12 years old. He left the room with the feeling of being in love. He spent the whole night awake and decided to dedicate himself to the cinema.