The void left by the death of a child narrated by Aramburu, magical realism to tell the story of the Civil War, Boyero naked and other books of the week

On October 23, 1980, a gas explosion at the Marcelino Ugalde national school in the town of Ortuella (Bizkaia) killed 50 children and three adults. A misfortune that radically changed the life of a town with 8,000 inhabitants. Almost 44 years later, Fernando Aramburu dedicates his last book, The boy, to tell that story. And to do so, it focuses on just one of those misfortunes, that of a single child and his family, to narrate the world in ruins left by the absence of those little ones. Within the Aramburu cycle dedicated to Basque people, this book represents a change, since it abandons the ETA terrorism that the previous ones addressed. And it also represents a change of genre, since it goes from the satire that the adventures of the two represented gudaris memos that starred Children of the fableto the drama of a story that unfolds “with sobriety and decorum without losing in the maneuver of containment the ability to penetrate the reader and move him,” according to Domingo Ródenas de Moya in his review.

The peninsula of empty houses, by David Uclés, is another of this week's featured books. It is a story of the Civil War, but treated as if it were a founding Arthurian cycle of today's Spain, and with touches of magical realism, as explained in his review Nada Suau, who adds: “Uclés has created a peculiar novel , timeless medium, autonomous with respect to the environment, for which it is difficult to imagine offspring or alliances with other voices millennial”.

In another record there is The wildest land. The protagonist of Lauren Groff's book is a woman who flees an English settlement in Virginia in the 17th century. She is pursued by soldiers, but also by the threat of hostile natives and the no less dangerous immensity of a nature as overwhelming as it is unknown. It is an epic adventure against hunger, cold and violence, but also a feminist, anti-colonial and environmentalist plea.

Juan Carlos Galindo, our crime novel specialist, presents an interesting article about two long-awaited novelties: I have some questions for you, by Rebecca Makkai, and 48 clues about my sister's disappearanceby Joyce Carol Oates, two titles about murdered women that will not leave anyone indifferent and that focus with strength and style on the victims, to transcend the noir genre and the fixation on the plot.

Babelia experts have also reviewed titles this week such as Epistolario II (1900-1904), by Miguel de Unamuno; the curious essay pirate illustration, by David Graeber, which theorizes about the possibility that pirates based on the island of Madagascar played a role in the genesis of the Enlightenment; and the memoirs that, under the title I don't know if I explain myself, Carlos Boyero has published. An unfiltered book that “collects the ideas, the manias, the myths, the hatreds and the infatuations of perhaps the most influential contemporary Spanish film commentator,” says Álex Grijelmo in his review of it.

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