If They Tell You That Juan Marsé Has Died

If they tell you that Juan Marsé has died

Born in Barcelona in 1933 as Joan Faneca Roca, he changed his name to Juan Marsé Carbó for his adoptive family, after the death of his mother a few days after childbirth.

Juan Marsé became one of the referents of current Spanish literature. Literary Memory of postwar Childhood, who died on Saturday at the Hospital of Sant Pau in Barcelona, at 87 years. This, after complications as a consequence of the renal insufficiency suffered for a while now.

When he turned 13 his father was imprisoned for his political ideas and Marsé had to start working as a jeweler, an activity that would combine with the publication of his first stories in the Insula and the Deer magazines. The above, in addition to writing about cinema in the specialized magazine Art-Cinema. In 1958 he won the Sesame Award of Accounts with nothing to die.

After being a finalist of the Brief Library Award of Seix Barral with his first novel, locked up with a single toy (1960), he went to live in Paris, where he worked in various trades, as a Spanish professor, screenwriter, translator and laboratory assistant.

Two years later he returned to Barcelona and published his second novel, this face of the Moon (1962), repudiated by its author and excluded from his complete works. It would follow him in 1965 last afternoons with Teresa, who won the Brief Library Prize and allowed him to leave the jeweler’s trade.

In the following years, consecration would achieve, thanks to works such as the dark history of the cousin Montse (1970), if they tell you that I fell (1973) – which was not published in Spain until 1976 because of Francoist censorship – and the girlof the gold panties (1978), with which he won the planet award.

Years after winning this award:

One day I will return (1982), Ronda del Guinardó (1984, Ciudad de Barcelona Award), the bilingual lover (1990, Athenaeum Award of Seville), the spell of Shanghai (1993), Rabos de Lagartija (2000, Critics Award and Critics andNational Narrative), Love Songs in Lolita’s Club (2005), Calligraphy of Dreams (2011), Happy News in Paper Airplanes (2014) and that fucking fucking (2016) complete the relationship of their novels.

Marsé’s novelistic career, which has 13 titles and about thirty books in total, with the girl of the gold panties, 1978 Planet Award, a work that had his literary counterpoint with another of his major works, one day I will return. Ronda del Guinardó (1984, Ciudad de Barcelona Award), the bilingual lover (1990, Ateneo de Sevilla Award), the spell of Shanghai (1993) and Rabos de Lagartija (2000, Awards of the Critics and National Narrative) were some ofThe major books of an indefatigable worker, who got up around 8.30 in the morning, had breakfast and started working. Thus, reviewing again and again the manuscripts that corrected at a table crowded with pens and pencils ("I am more and more punctatory and damn with what I write," said who in 1962 published this face of the moon, who never wanted to reissue).

His death has meant the end of a literary era that covers the Spanish postwar period until the second decade of the 21st century.