Los peces de la amargura (2006), Años lentos (2012), Patria (2016) and the Children of this tale that concerns us form a kind of narrative frieze mapped by Fernando Aramburu (San Sebastián, 1959). Say aesthetically transforms the pain the world of terror has caused in the Basque Country for decades. It has been said, and rightly so, that the San Sebastian writer established an ethical “tragic realism” to the extent that he wanted to explain the victims’ suffering in a non-dogmatic literary form.
In this new fiction, the author moves away from symbolism, harshness, loneliness and pain, and paints a candid portrait of beings that show that the damage done in these fictions cannot be remedied with indifference or silence. But the reader expects neither the structural complexity of Patria nor the intensified realism colored by an ancestral violence that is the exact measure of the insatiable hole of a still-bleeding wound.
Now here’s a long vaudeville story, believe it or not, funny, grotesque, sometimes fleeting, and if you like, the other side of that Motherland, ignited by the panorama of Basque and Spanish letters in 2016. because the sharp pain of that novel in this novel has the humorous look infused between the adventures of Asier and Joseba, Don Quixote and Sancho, but they need each other as in Miguel de Cervantes’ novel. Learning the Cervantine lesson from Quixote, Aramburu builds a narrative building in the form of communication vessels that look at the world as if ETA is still active, with strong, fast and efficient verbal expressions, and can therefore say: « We are already operational on the way to Euskal Herria. We know this very clearly on a theoretical level. We follow ETA guidelines without ETA».
The whole tale revolves around these two characters waiting to perform in the south of France because that’s the key, that’s the point, a tale between Asier and Joseba, relentless fish, watching each other and yes, a clear moral or matter in a minefield of terror if it is serious, how is it possible for such small-scale ETA members: «They got into a prank game. Lying on the bottom of the boat, they killed time-killing, argumentative, alternative cynics like versolaris in prose. Everyone laughed at their own joke. Rivals, let your grandmother laugh at them ».
The idle and secret waiting of these two bandits is both ridiculous and painful: “We’ve come to fill a void. For now, reaching big goals doesn’t matter. The important thing is to keep the fire burning. Let the enemy continue to be afraid.” The drills before acting are simply broom shooting tests, stealing chickens as if kidnapping a businessman, or throwing stones like a grenade. Daughter of Aramburu’s good and different work, he realized that Hijos de la fábula had accomplished what he intended. comic episodes that make up a novel of impossible occurrence: an ethical and technical challenge.