Miramientos

The origins of "Miramientos" lie in the appendix titled "Artistas perfectos", which concludes the book "Vidas escritas". In that piece, Javier Marías discussed photographic portraits of thirty-seven authors—all of them foreign and deceased. The exclusion of Spanish-language writers from that earlier work prompted him to write commentaries for the magazine "Cuadernos Cervantes" on portraits of Valle-Inclán, Borges, Aleixandre, Benet, Bioy Casares, García Lorca, Victoria Ocampo, Fernando Savater, Cabrera Infante, Neruda, Mendoza, Martínez Sarrión, Cernuda, and Quiroga. He later gathered these—along with other portraits—into the present volume, rounding it out with a "Fake self-portrait" dedicated to himself: a temptation he could not resist—as he himself acknowledges—but one he sought to approach with that same sense of "miramiento".