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.
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