Above all, we should not misunderstand the tone of this novel which captivated us from the start, until the last of its 600 or so pages. Behind a falsely dark premise, we discovered a caustic humor and a biting irony that made us laugh many times.
Toni is a 50-year-old Spanish high school philosophy teacher who “drags his feet on the ground of life” like a slug, by his own admission. In what he presents as an ultimate diary, he admits that his disappointment got the better of his desire to live and that he therefore chose the date on which he will have to return “the atoms borrowed from nature”; he allows himself a year to put his affairs in order and understand why he wishes to renounce existence.
As the months go by, he gradually gets rid of his material possessions, starting with the books in his impressive library; he discusses politics and philosophy with his only and best friend in the bar where they usually meet to drown their daily disappointments. And every evening, he sits down to keep this diary in which he tries to dust off his messy memories – his childhood in Francoist Spain, between two parents who had a silent hatred for each other, his own hatred for his brother , this “civil war for two” that was his marriage, the years of loneliness that followed his divorce or his contradictory emotions towards his son to whom he associates the word disaster.
With cynicism, he takes a hilarious look at how he thinks he has messed up his life. In these pages where he allows himself to show a ferocious sincerity, he entrusts his vilest and most shameful thoughts, his unavowable secrets and all that he has never been able to express until now. We are sometimes on the verge of political incorrectness… And in turn, we oscillate between the instinct of despising this man who we could call selfish to say the least and that of pity him, while sympathizing with his torments . But in the end, it will be rather this last feeling which will prevail.
Birds of passage is not a novel that one reads in one go: it is a company to which one becomes attached in spite of ourselves and which one takes pleasure in hanging around for weeks. And each time we dive back into it, we find this strange and delicious familiarity that Fernando Aramburu manages to install without our knowledge.
Birds of passage
Fernando Aramburu (translated from Spanish by Claude Bleton)
South Acts
624 pages