Translation Rights TQE / The Trumpet Player of the Utopia

Fernando Aramburu has always accustomed his readers to good literature. His novels and tales stand out due to their personal style, great care for language, and set of classical arguments that do not tend to leave the reader indifferent. El trompetista del Utopía (The Trumpet Player of the Utopia), his third novel, gives us an extraordinary story about generosity, love, the weight of guilt, and the often unbearable ties to the past within the frame of a black Spain —very black at times— of brass bands, and of annoyance and irritation.

Benito Lacunza, thirty-something, thin and with bags under his eyes due to a drunken existence, works nights at the Bar Utopía in the Almenara neighbourhood of Madrid. Sometimes, if his boss allows it, he treats the customers to his trumpet playing. He dreams that someday someone will recognize his jazz talent, and meanwhile learns of the news that his father —an old member of the military party and a strict man who he does not remember all too well, owner of some lands and of a sunny house in Estella, a small village to the north of Spain— is agonizing. Encouraged by Pauli —his partner, and the woman that provides him hot food and shelter—, he goes to his fa-

mily’s native village to claim his part of the inheritance. But in Estella he is met with a set of unexpected problems that have nothing to do with the will: his brother Lalo, a young man known for his

generosity, is about to marry a woman with doubtful intentions. Benito decides to do something about it, without knowing that a strange chain of events is about to change his life forever.

Fernando Aramburu was born in San Sebastián in 1959. He has a degree in Spanish Language, Literature and Linguistics from Zaragoza University. He currently lives in Germany, where he has worked as a Spanish teacher since 1985. His work has been granted, among others, the Ramón Gómez de la Serna Prize 1997, the Euskadi Prize 2001, and for his short stories Los peces de la amargura (The Fish of Sorrow) the XI Mario Vargas Llosa NH Prize, the Dulce Chacón Prize, and the Prize of the Spanish Language Academy. The movie Bajo las estrellas (Under the Stars) based on Aramburu’s novel El trompetista del utopía (The trumpet player of the Utopia) was awarded a Goya Prize in 2008 for best adapted screenplay by the Spanish Cinematographic Academy.