Juan Marse

Born on January 8, 1933, the mother of Juan Faneca Roca (his real name) died in childbirth, after which he was adopted by the Marsé couple, from whom he took his last names. Without finishing his studies, he dedicated himself to the jeweler’s trade from a very young age. He worked for some time in the Barcelona film magazine Arcinema, and began his literary career in 1958 with stories in the magazines Ínsula and El Ciervo. In 1960 he published his first novel, “Locked up with a single toy”, followed by titles like “This face of the moon” and “Last afternoons with Teresa”.

Being integrated into an environment marked by militancy in the Communist Party, the writer joined in 1962, but he immediately realized that the formation did not tolerate free spirits, so he ended up quitting. “It was a mistake,” he acknowledged. Juan Marsé  married Joaquina Hoyas in 1966, they had two children, Alejandro, who was born in 1968, and Berta, in 1969.

In 1964 he made his debut as a film scriptwriter collaborating in the writing of Donde tú estés , directed by Germán Lorente . Shortly after he would sign Mi profesora particular , directed  by Jaime Camino , Libertad provisional , and El largo invierno , with which he would end his journey as a librettist for the Seventh Art. He didn’t have much luck getting his novels brought to the screen. “I hate all the adaptations of my books,” he explained on one occasion. The first to try it was Jordi Cadena , with the tibia The dark story of cousin Montse, focused above all on the eroticism of the story, which he did not like at all, since he hated the Uncovering. Vicente Aranda then entered the scene , obsessed with taking his books to the movies, despite the fact that the writer was not entirely happy with this obsession. “He has little talent,” he went so far as to declare. Aranda filmed the also risque  The Girl with the Golden Panties , If They Tell You I Fallen , The Bilingual Lover and the especially unspeakable Love Songs at Lolita’s Club. “They are failed films,” she stated shamelessly. “They are, not because they have badly adapted the literary text, but because they are bad by themselves. That is to say, when a film that adapts a novel is good, it is good for strictly cinematographic and non-literary reasons. The cinematographic narrative has nothing to do with the literary.

It seemed that he was going to have more luck with The Shanghai Haunting, since Victor Erice , one of the greats of Spanish cinema, worked for years on the adaptation. But the producer, Andrés Vicente Gómez , did not want a three-hour feature film, he wanted to interfere with the director’s vision, and in the end he ended up firing him, and replacing him with Fernando Trueba , who signed one of his worst titles. “He doesn’t seem like a good filmmaker to me,” said Marsé, who did not mince words. However, he was full of praise when Erice posted his script. “It’s even better than my novel,” he said. Gonzalo Herralde signed the screen version of Últimas tardes con Teresa, well-intentioned, but also failed.

In 2009, when he was awarded the Cervantes prize, he confronted Spanish cinema, after in an interview with El Mundo he declared that the problem with Spanish cinema was not piracy, but “the lack of talent”. “Novelists have much less talent,” Aranda replied, fed up with his continuous attacks. “Marsé insists that we have no talent because a Hitchcock has not been born here . Nor has a Balzac or a Flaubert been born! Let Marsé think of him and not of us. That is what he has to do. Above all, in the cinema In Spanish, we do have international figures, but novelists don’t. They have nothing at all.” In addition, Aranda explained that if he adapted works by Marsé it was “to improve them.”

Marsé himself would have the last word, who in his latest novel, “That so distinguished whore”, took the opportunity to put Spanish filmmakers to the boil. “I have criticized some things about the cinema, such as the despicable genre of the uncover, no matter how much Mariano Ozores is now rewarded , it was not the type of cinema that this country needed in the transition, the opportunity to restore some dignity to Spanish cinema was lost” he explained in an interview.