The literary critic, born in Buenos Aires and who would have turned 80 on December 18, died this Sunday in Barcelona, the city where he had lived since 1970. A collaborator with EL PAÍS since the late seventies and, he compiled part of his practice as a professional reader in the volume (2017). When reviewing it here, in a house now emptier since his absence and that of the dean, 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 contemporary classics passed through his hands, such as Soldiers of Salamis o Crematorium or works by Fernando Aramburu or Belén Gopegui, when they had just been published.
In 1970, when getting off the ship in the port of Barcelona, he told in an article about his countrywoman, Ayala was a graduate in Philosophy and Letters who was soon able to dedicate himself to the world of books. He remembered a time as a bookseller at the Drugstore, where some saw the big names of the Latin American boom, and he began his career as a critic, collaborating in emblematic magazines of the late Franco era such as Triumph y Notebooks for Dialogue. When he was already collaborating in the Libros supplement of this newspaper, he became a regular signature of the leftist The Old Mole, as he recalled in the obituary he dedicated to . To these collaborations he added another of his most lasting: the exercise of criticism in The Mail.
Ayala-Dip was independent in his judgments and, at the same time, acted as a necessary piece of a mature cultural system, where criticism grants a professional prestige that takes you from publication to publication and from jury to literary jury—he was in the Dulce Chacón Prize or the Ibero-American Fiction Prize, in the Critics’ Awards or the —. He also exercised political opinion, especially in the Catalan pages of EL PAÍS and , and recently also signed opinion columns in the Barcelona newspaper We buy. I had the project of compiling some of his pieces in volume and wanted me to preface it.
At the beginning of this year, from the hospital, he wrote warning that he would be late in sending a review and announcing the prompt 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 a genre and who especially liked the discovery of new voices whose trajectories he followed in his criticism and whom in some cases he tried to guide. He excelled with skill thanks to his extensive background in what was his main profession.
