The literary critic J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip dies at 79 | Culture | EUROtoday

The literary critic J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip, born in Buenos Aires and who would have turned 80 on December 18, died this Sunday in Barcelona, ​​town the place he had lived since 1970. A contributor to EL PAÍS for the reason that late seventies and critic of the Babelia complement since its basis, he compiled a part of his tenure as an expert reader within the quantity Two many years of narrative in Spanish (2017). When reviewing it right here, in a home that’s emptier in the present day since his absence and that of Dean José María Guelbenzu, Javier Rodríguez Marcos referred to the job of the militant reviewer: “The reviewer judges in the presence of the author, true, but above all of the newspaper reader, the one whose notion of posterity expires every 24 hours.” Some of the up to date classics handed by his arms, akin to Soldiers of Salamis o Crematorium or works by Fernando Aramburu or Belén Gopegui, once they had simply been revealed.

In 1970, when getting off the ship within the port of Barcelona, ​​he instructed in an article about his countrywoman Patricia Gabancho, Ayala was a graduate in Philosophy and Letters who was quickly capable of dedicate himself to the world of books. He remembered a time as a bookseller on the Drugstore, the place one Sant Jordi noticed the large names of the Latin American growth, and he started his profession as a critic collaborating in emblematic magazines of the late Franco period akin to Triumph y Notebooks for Dialogue. When he was already collaborating within the Libros complement of this newspaper, he grew to become an everyday signature of the leftist The Old Mole, as he recalled within the obituary he devoted to Miguel Barroso. To these collaborations he added one other of his most lasting: the train of criticism in The Mail.

Ayala-Dip was unbiased in his judgments and, on the similar time, acted as a needed piece of a mature cultural system, the place criticism grants an expert status that takes you from publication to publication and from jury to literary jury—he was within the Dulce Chacón Prize or the Ibero-American Fiction Prize, within the Critics’ Prizes or the National Essay Prize. He additionally exercised political opinion, particularly within the Catalan pages of EL PAÍS and in the course of the years of the Procés, and just lately he additionally signed opinion columns within the Barcelona newspaper We purchase. I had the challenge of compiling a few of his items in quantity and I needed Lluís Bassets to preface it.

At the start of this 12 months, from the hospital, he wrote warning that he can be late in sending a overview and saying the immediate publication of his first and final novel: it must be titled My mom’s boyfriends. J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip was a vocational reader who was not restricted to a style and who particularly favored the invention of latest voices whose trajectories he adopted in his criticism and whom in some circumstances he tried to information. He excelled with ability due to his in depth background in what was his primary career.