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.
RIGHTS SOLD TO
