Fernando Aramburu composed a magnificent portrait of a Basque society immersed in the poison of ETA's terrorist unreason.
He did it in the praised
Homeland
.
And perhaps only he would now be allowed to make a work of fiction in which terrorists are treated with the resources of satirical humor and the picaresque novel.
He does so in
Hijos de la fábula
, where the protagonists are two young men signed up for the gang on two newscasts before it announces that it is laying down its arms.
In the work they display all their pathos and stupidity in adventures narrated with humor, although without ceasing to seriously treat the crude indoctrination to which many young people were subjected in that bloody time.
The
paratexts
―book flaps, back covers, summaries― seem superfluous since they have not been written by the author who signs the cover, but not, at least, by the Italian publisher Sellerio.
Far from being so, they constitute an inexcusable corpus when it comes to composing the image of an eminent figure of European letters such as Leonardo Sciascia.
This is confirmed in the volume
Leonardo Sciascia, writer and editor
, our book of the week, which brings together the multiple writings that the Sicilian author wrote in his time as head of the aforementioned label.
Little jewels that also reveal the limitless intellectual world of the author of
El caso Moro
, the chronicle recently republished by Tusquets in line with the series
Exterior noche
(Filmin).
In addition, this week
Babelia
's critics are reviewing works such as the biography
Néstor Sánchez La conducta iluminada
, which portrays the controversial Argentine writer;
or the novels
El corazón del daño
, by María Negroni, and
Anoxia
, by Miguel Ángel Hernández.
Finally, we must highlight two essays,
The ambiguous word.
Intellectuals in Spain (1889-2019)
, in which David Jiménez Torres covers the meaning (sometimes reviled) that the word intellectual has had in Spain in the last 150 years;
and
Miguel Primo de Rivera.
Dictatorship, populism and nation
, in which its author, Alejandro Quiroga Fernández de Soto, portrays the coup general as "the inventor of right-wing populism in Spain."
Furthermore, he points to his dictatorial regime as more repressive and close to fascism than previous historians have admitted.
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