We live, says the prolific Spanish author Javier Marías, in an “age of exhaustive and frequently futile erudition”, in which every aspect of writers’ lives is exposed to the public gaze. This book, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is the succinct antidote to such biographical redundancy. It’s an eclectic selection of 26 brief literary lives: all they have in common is that they are dead, not Spanish and were “all fairly disastrous individuals”. These far from exemplary characters are described with a novelist’s eye for the tragedy and absurdity of life: the taciturn William Faulkner carrying the coffin of his five-day-old daughter to the cemetery alone; the “persnickerty” Joseph Conrad writing in his yellow-striped bathrobe; the “cold and distant” James Joyce penning obscene letters to his wife; Rainer Maria Rilke spending his short life “waiting for the lyric”; and Yukio Mishima performing hara-kiri as “the ultimate act of masturbation”. Roland Barthes may have announced the death of the author nearly 50 years ago, but this acutely observed book shows that we are still enthralled by our wordsmiths, however calamitous their lives.
• To order Written Lives for £7.99 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
