Translation Rights TQE / Empty Eyes

We already knew that Fernando Aramburu had an unquestionable ability for creating strong and authentic characters and stories; this was revealed by his first novel, Fuegos con limón (Fires with Lemon), that obtained the Ramón Gómez de la Serna Prize in 1997 and was translated into German; and further proof of it came with his short story collection No ser no duele (No Existence, No Pain). Los ojos vacíos (Empty Eyes), his second novel, is destined to place him among the most important writers of Spanish letters.

August 1916: It is a time of tribulation in Antíbula; the country’s monarch has been ominously assassinated, the queen has shamelessly tried to flee, and the atmosphere is charged with rumours of an imminent dictatorship. A somewhat mysterious stranger arrives at Old Cuiña’s inn. The political convulsion - to which he does not seem a stranger - will soon drag him to disaster; but from his furtive love affairs with the innkeeper’s young daughter, will in time be born the protagonist and narrator of the novel. A bastard boy, he is considered to be the devil´s son, and in fact, the child seems to be branded with an invisible stigma that will make him develop among revealing discoveries and cruel deceptions. The ferocious meanness of his grandfather, the sad sweetness of his mother, the awakening of the senses and of happiness that books provide will all be the points of reference of a life that, perhaps like all others, only aspires to understand the chaos that surrounds it.

Fernando Aramburu confesses that he started writing Los ojos vacíos with the intention of writing an apocryphal guide to an imaginary country, but that little by little, the necessity to narrate this tormented story about the loss of innocence and the difficult creation of an identity took over. It is then a formative novel, masterfully written in the thick Spanish of those who have drunk thirstily from the classics.

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.