Diarios

Shortly after the death of Rafael Chirbes in 2015, an indispensable first posthumous book appeared: the novel Paris-Austerlitz. Now, six years after his death, the reader is holding his diaries, which the author reviewed and prepared for publication. These are annotations collected in various notebooks that cover the period from 1985 to 2005, that is, from his beginnings as a writer, before publishing his first novel -Mimoun, finalist for the Herralde Prize in 1988-, until shortly before its final appeal. international consecration with Crematorium. These diaries are the self-portrait without masks of a human being -his doubts, weaknesses, fears, illnesses, fortitude, ambitions, desires- and a succession of opinions and experiences related to politics, sex, music, cinema and literature; reflections on what Chirbes loved or hated, always in a passionate way. But they also offer a privileged approach to what we could call the writer's kitchen: Chirbes notes his analyzes -lucid and forceful- on other people's books (among them, some diaries: those of Musil) and records the ins and outs of the creation of his own work, doubts, stylistic searches, his way of looking at and portraying reality... And the tolls of the "writer's life" also appear, for example in the story of a promotional trip to Germany in 2004, full of anecdotes sometimes bleak and at other times grotesquely absurd. Undoubtedly, these newspapers are destined to become a classic of the genre, and they are a fundamental document to complete the portrait of an essential writer of Spanish literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.