Translation Rights TQE / The Fish of Bitterness

Fernando Aramburu had been toying with the idea of writing about Basque characters and scenarios for a long time. He waited until he felt the necessary maturity as a writer in order to give his particular literary take on the thorny subject of terrorist violence and its collateral effects in the Basque Country.

A father clings to his mundane routines, such as taking care of his aquarium, in order to deal with the misfortune of his hospitalised and disabled daughter; a married couple is bothered by the constant harassment endured by one of their neighbors, and they wish that he would go away; a man does everything in his power to avoid being pointed out by everybody in town, as they all turn their backs on him; a woman decides to leave with her children without really knowing why she is being harassed. The stories in Los peces de la amargura are written as chronicles or articles, as first-person narrations, as letters or stories told to children. They are very much a tribute and a denunciation, and they are told without apparent drama, so that only emotion arises – indirectly, unexpectedly, but most efficiently.

It is easy to feel moved when reading the apparently modest, deceptively simple stories that make up Los peces de la amargura, as they deal with the painful subject of criminal violence based on a political excuse. It takes an exceptional narrator such as Aramburu to tell it in a truthful and believable way. The variety and originality of narrators and approaches, the richness of characters and their different experiences make up an unforgettable image of the years of bloodshed in Euskadi.

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.