Does Javier Marías Have a Leg Fetish?

BUT WHO FROM SPAIN?

Every so often a foreign-born and foreign-living literary writer is heralded and crowned by Americans as our literary ambassador, our tour guide to a particular country and its history. Improbably, these writers even become trendy, in their own effete way. Take the German-born writer W. G. Sebald, for example, and his novels about German immigrants and the ghostly, lingering effects of World War II. His fame was posthumous-seeming long before his death in December of 2001, in a car accident. Oftentimes the transformation of an unknown foreign writer into a “well-known” writer (rarely, if ever, a bestseller) occurs because one of his or her books has been made into a popular movie. Such was not the case with Sebald, but it was the case with Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls. (I, for one, had never heard of Arenas, and was thankful to have been turned onto his work through Schnabel’s film.) A foreign writer’s future ambassadorship might also start at the level of the university syllabus. In addition to reading Duras both in French and literature college classes, my classmates and I read and reread Kundera. We presumed he was the single Czech writer worth reading—and why shouldn’t we have? If something is worth importing to the States (a Czech writer, a German car, a Japanese television) we import it, don’t we? We assumed, wrongly, that we were reading the best, the only worthwhile example of Czech literature; yet we were never assigned, for example, Bohumil Hrabal, author of I Served the King of England and a precise, very funny writer worthy of as much attention as Kundera. Regardless of the origin of these writers’ popularity—films, or university fashionableness (a recent student at a well-known graduate writing program complained that he’d been assigned Sebald in every one of his classes), or the Nobel prizes (we do turn to the Swedes for cues), or the Booker prizes (since the Booker committee went on its former-colony kick)—these periodic embracings of foreign writers help us believe that our culture isn’t as us-centric, or U.S.-centric, as it is.

But curiously (sadly, depressingly), when one foreign writer’s work is cinematized and celebrated, our cultural interest in the works of his or her countrymen is contained rather than inspired; there’s no rush on Cuban writers after Arenas’s rise to moderate reknown, and why should there be? We have our long-suffering, formerly imprisoned Cuban writer. The successful translation and publication of one Cuban (or Filipino or Bangladeshi) does not mean the floodgates have finally opened, and Cuban/Filipino/Bangladeshi writers will...