Non-fiction Sketches: Vidas escritas and Miramientos

Vidas escritas (1992) (Written Lives, 2006) and Miramientos(Glimpses) (1999) have in common at least one authorial intention: Marías's desire to write brief sketches about writers whom he finds intriguing. While on the face of it the two books share certain elements of composition (for example, photographic images of the writers in Miramientos; both photographs and drawings of authors in Vidas), the differences between the two texts are pronounced. Most notably, in Vidas Marías comments solely on non-Spanish writers who are deceased, using biographical and other information to form the content of his narrative, while in Miramientos he focuses exclusively on Spanish-language authors and comments only on the images inserted in the text, with no external information. In this way he offers a purely impressionistic “glimpse” of several writers no longer alive, some of whom he has known. To emphasize the occasionally playful perspective of the book, he also includes a section of photos of himself, with comments in the same fashion as those made about the dead authors.

Vidas escritas

Vidas is not the first time that Marías has written brief biographical introductions to authors. As he notes in the prologue, the idea for the volume came from his edition of Cuentos únicos (Singular Stories) (1989), in which he put together an odd collection of short stories written originally in English by relatively obscure authors, with brief biographical sketches about each.