Francisco Ayala (novelist)

Francisco Ayala died in Madrid, 3 November 2009, at the age of 103. He was cremated at the San Isidro cemetery in Madrid.

In 2007 he became the first donor for the Caja de las Letras (Letter Vault) of the Instituto Cervantes.

He was a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1997.

He wrote his memoirs, Recuerdos y olvidos (Reminiscences and Overlooks, 1982, 1983, 1988, 2006). He was a member of the Academia de Buenas Letras de Granada. In November 2003 he was proclaimed Honorary Fellow of the association Granada Histórica at his birthplace. He mentioned that was "maybe, one of the most beautiful moments in the last stage of my life because, after nearly a century of feeling a granadino across the world, now I feel recognised by the granadinos themselves".

After these novels, Ayala kept publishing short tales, such as those collected in El As de Bastos (The Ace of Staves, 1963), El rapto (The Kidnap, 1965), and El jardín de las delicias (The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1971). The latest features a contrast between the satyric objectivity in the first part, Diablo mundo (Devil World), and the evocative, subjective and lyrical tone in the second, Días felices (Happy Days). These works were followed by De triunfos y penas (Of Triumph and Sorrow, 1982) and El jardín de las malicias (The Garden of Earthly Malice, 1988), where he collected six tales written at different times in his life.

He returned to Spain first in 1960. From that year onwards he would return every summer and bought a house there, rejoining literary life. In 1976, after Franco's death, he moved to Madrid for good, where he continued his work as a writer, lecturer and journalist. In 1983, at the age of 77, he was elected to the Real Academia Española. He kept on writing to a very old age. In 1988 he received the Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas. In 1991 he received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize and, in 1998, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature.

La cabeza del cordero (The Lamb Head, 1949) is a collection of tales on the Civil War, where he pays more attention to the analysis of passions and human behaviour than to the relation of outside developments. Muertes de perro (Dog Deaths, 1958) denounced the situation of a country under a dictatorship, while presenting human degradation in a world with no values. El fondo del vaso (The Bottom of the Glass, 1962) complements his previous novel, which is commented by several characters. Irony becomes a central resource in this work, though a greater understanding for the human being replaces contempt.

After a long silence, Ayala begun his second stage in exile with El hechizado (The Bewitched, 1944), a tale of a Creole man trying to meet King Charles II of Spain (known as the Bewitched), which became part of Los usurpadores (The Usurpers, 1949), a collection of seven narrations with the common theme of lust for power. The story is used here as a reflection on the past, in order to better know the present. Ayala gets closer here to Kafka's existential and absurd world, including an implicit critic to the immorality and stupidity of power.

He got a Ph.D. in Laws at the Universidad de Madrid, where he would also be a teacher. A post-graduate grant allowed him to go to Berlin to study philosophy and sociology from 1929 to 1931, during the advent of Nazism. There, he met the Chilean Etelvina Silva Vargas, whom he married in 1931 and with whom he would later have a daughter, Nina.

During his first stage, before the Civil War, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu (Tragicomedy of a Spiritless Man, 1925) and Historia de un amanecer (A Sunrise Tale, 1926) follow a traditional narrative line. With El boxeador y el ángel (The Boxer and the Angel, 1929) and Cazador en el alba (Hunter at Dawn, 1930) he embraced avant-garde prose. Both tale collections feature a metaphorical style, stylistically brilliant, with a lack of interest in the anecdotical and a fascination for the modern world.

Francisco Ayala García-Duarte (16 March 1906 – 3 November 2009) was a Spanish writer, the last representative of the Generation of '27.