Fernando Aramburu broke
into the Spanish narrative in 1996 with the great opera prima that is Fuegos
con limón (Fires With Lemon). He has just received the Euskadi
Prize to the best book in Spanish literature of 2000 for his second novel, Los
ojos vacíos (Empty Eyes), and now surprises us with a gathering
of texts, written when “the artist” was taking his first steps in the field of
literature and debated between the many paths which he could choose to follow.
Revisited fifteen years later by the consolidated writer that he is today, they
undoubtedly acquire the dimensions of a model for formation and learning.
Aramburu wrote El
artista y su cadáver when “the artist” decided to “murder”
through these prose exercises, the hectic poet that he carried inside for years
and who was beginning to bother him: “… you wrote during the afternoons those
deeply conceited verses of the youth who strongly aspires to be elegantly ill
once in a while, a sad and undignified being…”. Exercises on style, trials and
proofs – Fuegos con limón was born precisely from the gradual
amplification of one of those texts-, ironic vignettes, vital fragments,
declarations of literary debts and aesthetic principles, as well as from the
obstinate reconstruction of a missing sentimental landscape re-elaborated in
memory. The proud writing of El artista y su cadaver demonstrates
that Aramburu moves with the same ease and pleasure through this brief
prose as in the novel and the short story.
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