The literary critic J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip, born in Buenos Aires and who would have been 80 years old on December 18, died this Sunday in Barcelona, the city where he had lived since 1970. Collaborator of EL PAÍS since the end of the seventies and critic of the Babelia supplement since its creation, he compiled part of his mandate as a professional reader in the volume Two decades of storytelling in Spanish (2017). Commenting on it here, in a house that is now emptier since his absence and that of dean José María Guelbenzu, Javier Rodríguez Marcos spoke of the profession of activist critic: “The critic judges in the presence of the author, true, but above all of the reader of the newspaper, the one whose notion of posterity expires every 24 hours.” Some contemporary classics have passed through his hands, such as Soldiers of Salamis either Crematorium or works by Fernando Aramburu or Belén Gopegui, even though they had just been published.
In 1970, when he got off the boat in the port of Barcelona, he recounts in an article about his compatriot Patricia Gabancho, Ayala had a degree in Philosophy and Letters and was soon able to devote himself to the world of books. He remembers a time when he was a bookseller at the Drugstore, where a certain Sant Jordi saw the big names of the Latin American boom, and he began his career as a critic collaborating on emblematic magazines of the end of the Franco era, such as Triumph And Dialogue notebooks. While he was already collaborating on the Libros supplement of this newspaper, he became a regular signature of the left party The Old Mole, as he recalled in the obituary he dedicated to Miguel Barroso. To these collaborations he adds another of his most lasting: the exercise of criticism in The mail.
Ayala-Dip was independent in his judgments and, at the same time, he acted as a necessary element of a mature cultural system, where criticism confers a professional prestige that takes you from publication to publication and from jury to literary jury – he was a winner of the Dulce Chacón Prize or the Ibero-American Fiction Prize, the Critics’ Prizes or the National Essay Prize. He also exercised his political opinion, notably in the Catalan pages of EL PAÍS and during the years of the Procés, and recently he also signed opinion columns in the Barcelona newspaper. Ara. I planned to compile some of his pieces into a volume and I wanted Lluís Bassets to do the preface.
Early this year, from hospital, he wrote to warn that he would be late in sending a review and to announce the imminent publication of his first and last novel: it should be titled My mother’s boyfriends. J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip was a vocational reader who was not limited to one genre and who particularly loved the discovery of new voices whose trajectories he followed in his criticism and whom he tried to guide in certain cases. He excelled competently with his extensive experience in what was his primary profession.
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