Javier Calvo
Encyclopedia
Javier Calvo Perales is a Spanish
writer
born in Barcelona
in 1973.
at the Autonomous University of Barcelona
and studied comparative literature
at Pompeu Fabra University
.
He's married to American writer
and photographer
Mara Faye Lethem. They have two children.
or movie snippets, manipulated quotes of other texts, compressed plots from other novels and an "open" conception of narration, taken from Free Cinema
and the montage techniques of filmmakers such as Jean Eustache
or John Cassavetes
. Other influences, recognizable in this book are the English novel
and the audiovisual world of cinema
and television
, with many of his short stories using the world of television as a theme.
) was published in 2003. It is the epic
-comical
chronicle of the shooting of a science fiction
film in London
and of the many ways that the eccentricity of its director
, Matsuhiro Takei, has unpredictable consequences in the life of the film's crew. In the pages of this book, the author repeats the sampling
technique, the manipulation of fragments of other movies and the organization of the novel's parts following certain montage sequence techniques. The novel was a unanimous critical success and was immediately translated to Italian
and German
.
and post punk aesthetics
. Una belleza rusa is a free version of the Vladimir Nabokov
story A Russian Beauty, where he uses characters and elements from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Crystal Palace is an autobiographic
story about the author's relationship with the series Doctor Who
during his childhood. Rosemary combines elements from the Roman Polanski
movie Rosemary's Baby
with the history of the band The Cure
. And Los ríos perdidos is a tribute to the novels of the Mary Poppins
series by P.L. Travers and the work of British musician and occultist Jhonn Balance.
thriller set in contemporary Barcelona
. The main character, Lucas Giraut, is an antique dealer with emotional problems who gets involved in the world of crime in order to become the person that he believes his father wanted him to be. In order to do so, he associates himself with a group of psychedelic rock
fanatical thieves and forgers who call themselves "The Down With the Sun Society". Mundo maravilloso was a finalist of the José Manuel Lara Foundation Award of 2008 and has recently been translated to English
(Harpercollins, 2009).
crime
novel, set in 19th century Barcelona.
with movie director Roger Gual, with whom he signed the script of Remake (Ovideo TV, 2005). They are currently working on the script for Gual's third feature film.
critic Julio Ortega. Among his literary influences are Jane Austen
, E.M. Forster, Aleister Crowley
, Pamela Lyndon Travers, B.S. Johnson, Juan Benet
, Joan Perucho, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair
, Roberto Bolaño
and Rodrigo Fresán
. Cinematic influences include David Lean
, Jean Eustache
, Alan Clarke
and Mike Leigh
.
El dios reflectante (The Reflecting God), Random House-Mondadori, 2003 (ISBN 84-397-0982-4)
Los ríos perdidos de Londres (The Lost Rivers of London), Random House-Mondadori, 2005 (ISBN 84-397-1413-0)
Mundo maravilloso (Wonderful World), Random House-Mondadori, 2007 (ISBN 84-397-1352-5)
VV.AA., Matar en Barcelona (To Kill in Barcelona), (short story anthology), Alpha Decay, 2009.
Corona de Flores (Wreath), Random House-Mondadori, 2010
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
born in Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
in 1973.
Life
Javier Calvo graduated in journalismJournalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
at the Autonomous University of Barcelona
Autonomous University of Barcelona
The Autonomous University of Barcelona is a public university mostly located in Cerdanyola, near the city of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain....
and studied comparative literature
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
at Pompeu Fabra University
Pompeu Fabra University
Pompeu Fabra University is a university in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It is widely considered to be one of the best universities in Spain and in Europe, and was ranked 1st in scientific productivity in Spain in 2009. Founded in 1990, it is named after the Catalan philologist Pompeu Fabra...
.
He's married to American writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and photographer
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
Mara Faye Lethem. They have two children.
Laugh Tracks
His first short-story compilation, Risas enlatadas (Laugh Tracks, 2001), shows stylistic elements that differ extremely from those of contemporary Spanish narrative: samplingSampling
Sampling may refer to:*Sampling , converting a continuous signal into a discrete signal*Sampling , converting continuous colors into discrete color components*Sampling , re-using portions of sound recordings in a piece...
or movie snippets, manipulated quotes of other texts, compressed plots from other novels and an "open" conception of narration, taken from Free Cinema
Free Cinema
Free Cinema was a documentary film movement that emerged in England in the mid-1950s. The term referred to an absence of propagandised intent or deliberate box office appeal. Co-founded by Lindsay Anderson, though he later disdained the 'movement' tag, with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza...
and the montage techniques of filmmakers such as Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.In his obituary for Eustache, the influential...
or John Cassavetes
John Cassavetes
John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor, screenwriter and filmmaker. He acted in many Hollywood films, notably Rosemary's Baby and The Dirty Dozen...
. Other influences, recognizable in this book are the English novel
English novel
The English novel is an important part of English literature.-Early novels in English:A number of works of literature have each been claimed as the first novel in English. See the article First novel in English.-Romantic novel:...
and the audiovisual world of cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
, with many of his short stories using the world of television as a theme.
The Reflecting God
Along the same line of his short story book, the novel El Dios Reflectante (The Reflecting GodAntichrist Superstar
Antichrist Superstar is the second full-length studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on October 8, 1996 in the US through Nothing and Interscope Records. The record's success in mainstream charts propelled the band into a household name and turned its frontman overnight...
) was published in 2003. It is the epic
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
-comical
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
chronicle of the shooting of a science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
film in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and of the many ways that the eccentricity of its director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
, Matsuhiro Takei, has unpredictable consequences in the life of the film's crew. In the pages of this book, the author repeats the sampling
Sampling
Sampling may refer to:*Sampling , converting a continuous signal into a discrete signal*Sampling , converting continuous colors into discrete color components*Sampling , re-using portions of sound recordings in a piece...
technique, the manipulation of fragments of other movies and the organization of the novel's parts following certain montage sequence techniques. The novel was a unanimous critical success and was immediately translated to Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
.
The Lost Rivers of London
In 2005, he published Los Ríos Perdidos de Londres (The Lost Rivers of London), his darkest book yet. It comprises four short novels, Una belleza rusa (A Russian Beauty), Crystal Palace, Rosemary and Mary Poppins: los ríos perdidos (Mary Poppins: The Lost Rivers). In this book, his style becomes dense and picks up influences not only of Gothic and Victorian narrative, but of Gothic rockGothic rock
Gothic rock is a musical subgenre of post-punk and alternative rock that formed during the late 1970s. Gothic rock bands grew from the strong ties they had to the English punk rock and emerging post-punk scenes...
and post punk aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
. Una belleza rusa is a free version of the Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
story A Russian Beauty, where he uses characters and elements from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Crystal Palace is an autobiographic
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
story about the author's relationship with the series Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
during his childhood. Rosemary combines elements from the Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers."...
movie Rosemary's Baby
Rosemary's Baby
Rosemary's Baby is a 1967 best-selling horror novel by Ira Levin, his second published book. Major elements of the story were inspired by the publicity surrounding the Church of Satan of Anton LaVey which had been founded in 1966.-Plot summary:...
with the history of the band The Cure
The Cure
The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Sussex in 1976. The band has experienced several line-up changes, with frontman, vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter Robert Smith being the only constant member...
. And Los ríos perdidos is a tribute to the novels of the Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins is a series of children's books written by P. L. Travers and originally illustrated by Mary Shepard. The books centre on a magical English nanny, Mary Poppins. She is blown by the East wind to Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane, London and into the Banks' household to care for their...
series by P.L. Travers and the work of British musician and occultist Jhonn Balance.
Wonderful World
His most recent novel is Mundo Maravilloso (Wonderful World, 2007). With more than six-hundred pages, it is a comicalComedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
thriller set in contemporary Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
. The main character, Lucas Giraut, is an antique dealer with emotional problems who gets involved in the world of crime in order to become the person that he believes his father wanted him to be. In order to do so, he associates himself with a group of psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
fanatical thieves and forgers who call themselves "The Down With the Sun Society". Mundo maravilloso was a finalist of the José Manuel Lara Foundation Award of 2008 and has recently been translated to English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
(Harpercollins, 2009).
Wreath
His most recent novel is Corona de Flores (Wreath, 2010) (Random House-Mondadori, 2010). GothicGothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
crime
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
novel, set in 19th century Barcelona.
Cinema
Javier Calvo collaborates regularly as screenwriterScreenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
with movie director Roger Gual, with whom he signed the script of Remake (Ovideo TV, 2005). They are currently working on the script for Gual's third feature film.
Style and Influences
Javier Calvo's style has been described as "post-urban grotesque" by SpanishSpain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
critic Julio Ortega. Among his literary influences are Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
, E.M. Forster, Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...
, Pamela Lyndon Travers, B.S. Johnson, Juan Benet
Juan Benet
-Early life:Benet was born in Madrid. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, his father died, and he left for San Sebastian with his family to find refuge. They stayed there until 1939, when they returned to the capital. In 1944, he completed his high school education and in 1948 he entered into...
, Joan Perucho, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL is a British writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.-Life and work:...
, Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
and Rodrigo Fresán
Rodrigo Fresán
Rodrigo Fresán is a fiction writer and journalist.He has published Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, Mantra and Jardines de Kensington and El fondo del cielo. They have been translated into many languages.Mantra, a portrait of Mexico City...
. Cinematic influences include David Lean
David Lean
Sir David Lean CBE was an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor best remembered for big-screen epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai , Lawrence of Arabia ,...
, Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.In his obituary for Eustache, the influential...
, Alan Clarke
Alan Clarke
Alan Clarke was a television and film director, producer and writer, born in Wallasey, Merseyside, England.Most of Clarke's output was for television rather than cinema, including work for the famous play strands The Wednesday Play and Play for Today...
and Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh
Michael "Mike" Leigh, OBE is a British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s...
.
Works
Risas enlatadas (Laugh Tracks), Grijalbo-Mondadori, 2001 (ISBN 84-397-0732-0)El dios reflectante (The Reflecting God), Random House-Mondadori, 2003 (ISBN 84-397-0982-4)
Los ríos perdidos de Londres (The Lost Rivers of London), Random House-Mondadori, 2005 (ISBN 84-397-1413-0)
Mundo maravilloso (Wonderful World), Random House-Mondadori, 2007 (ISBN 84-397-1352-5)
VV.AA., Matar en Barcelona (To Kill in Barcelona), (short story anthology), Alpha Decay, 2009.
Corona de Flores (Wreath), Random House-Mondadori, 2010