Fernando Aramburu ridicules ETA

UNDER RECORD

• MANUEL LLORENTE

Updated Friday, January 27, 2023-12:00

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The same author who approached and explained the ETA drama better than any documentary, than any testimony, the writer who shook an entire country with a novel, returns to the same scenario but in a different way, through humor

.

Aramburu has dared and has achieved it with his new work of fiction,

, which

.

children of the fable

Fernando Aramburu

tusquets.

320 pages

.

€20.90 Ebook: €10.99

you can buy it here

.

The plot is simple.

Two ETA militants, or candidates for it, with no experience in France, are waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

remain

, not far from Toulouse.

They trust but at the same time they feel forgotten.

, as in the work of Samuel Beckett.

They are cut off from the world because they do not know French or have been trained to use firearms.

So the two young people (Asier and Joseba, 20 and 21 years old) get bored.

The novel will develop through the dialogue between the two sympathizers of the terrorist band completely confused.

Especially when they find out that

the novel of

Fernando Aramburu

(San Sebastián, 1959) reads quickly.

He devours

Short phrases at the service of the sense of irony.

of an organization that killed more than 850 people.

Aramburu does so by ridiculing two of its members, whom he draws as clumsy, insecure, and naive.

The writer shows his intentions from the first page.

He resorts to a good part of the clichés used in jokes about the Basques.

Asier and Joseba will meet a member of ETA, Txalupa, who was going to be a stone lifter but was left on the way;

He also had no luck as a pelotari.

And his career in the band did not prosper either, he has gone to the reserve because he suffers from asthma.

He lives depressed.

He is the one who reproaches them for smelling like chicken shit.

A few pages later, a dog says:

.

Joseba is a fat, obese militant.

and clumsy

.

And fragile.

S

in the clinic of his town.

He awaits the birth of a son from a woman older than him who has him intimidated.

Asier, who happens to be the leader of this mini toy commando, considers that women “weaken the warrior.

The makeup, the perfume, the tits, the little words of affection, all that is to tame us men ».

Moral?

Asier and Joseba wait for orders because they have no initiative and when they do something it is pathetic.

A Browning that was supposedly unloaded is fired at them;

around the farm, to train,

with which they sweep the surroundings of the house, hit imaginary shots against a fence post to which a cap has been placed to give greater credibility to the training,

("Take it as training. Better yet, as maneuvers. And in the end we will execute it. Imagine that it is a businessman").

The novel recounts a flight forward, aimlessly.

Asier and Joseba need to justify themselves, they are looking for some

(action) with which to go down in history.

Even

.

The search for acronyms that immortalize his exploits is a caricature, a debauchery.

Like small robberies (they don't have money, they live on a fluke) in supermarkets.

It would be laughable if the reader managed to forget that ETA's shadow was behind it.

The owner of the poultry farm that welcomes them is a communist, he wears a sticker with the hammer and sickle on his watch strap, he has a dog that he has named Mao.

The cartoonish tone of this novel is reminiscent of that of

by Flaubert, the unfinished and funny novel in which he gave free rein to the wanderings and crazy illusions of two retirees who dream of monopolizing human knowledge, nothing less.

Fernando Aramburu next to the sculpture 'El Peine del Viento'.

Carlos Garcia Well

Everything can lead to the fact that the word fable in the title of the novel leads to a moral, that that nonsense of the terrorist organization could only be doomed to failure.

You could even see something much more hurtful in the expression children of the fable.

of course this

.

How not to remember the movie

(1977), an ironic title like few others, in which Roberto Benigni played a father who made his little son see with all sorts of tricks that the horror of a concentration camp was just a game.

Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler with

(1940): the brilliant actor played with a plastic world globe, raised it with his hands and even with his buttocks and mockingly imitated the gestures of the little Austrian despot in his addresses in such a way that they provoked laughter, even though there was always underneath a bitter resentment

Or the film of another virtuoso of cinema,

(1942) by Ernst Lubitsch, where a theater company performs a play entitled Gestapo.

Fernando Aramburu thus continues a numerous literary career that reached its zenith with

(2016) -recognized with the National Narrative Prize, the Critics' Prize, the Francisco Umbral and the European Strega, among others-, where he portrayed the murder of a businessman through the ties of two close families.

But, above all, the

of some of them.

Two years later, Aramburu surprised with a photograph of himself, without ignoring stark confessions from his own family, in

(also in Tusquets).

In this book she stripped down.

No concessions.

It is the best way to approach both the Aramburu man and the Aramburu creator.

The limits in which he lived and in which he could fall.

Distance necessary?

There he told, for example, how he founded the CLOC Group of Art and Disart with some friends.

«We thought that as it is done

, we could make life with the flames of literature.

Albert Camus stopped our hands from breaking glass».

About an attack in San Sebastián, he writes:

.

Let's see if we understand each other.

It was a goal, an annoying rheum in the eye of a utopia ».

To write

either

perhaps you have to live far from the Basque Country, distance yourself.

Watch the drama from afar.

Aramburu resides

where he has been a Spanish language teacher for many years.

He visits Spain sporadically.

But since that voluntary residence he has seen everything clearer.

Regarding his claims, by calling him there, he has confessed the following: «Just as, at birth, we find the music of Mozart, the facades of Manhattan or the unfathomable poetry of Vallejo together with the gifts of generous nature,

and it is grateful to strive for

before the last hour,

, or at least try, exempt from the childish vanity of perpetuating our name in lips after the quota of days that was granted to us.

Let's learn from the poppies that brighten the short day with their simple condition of poppies.

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