Divorced for ten years, father of a twenty-five-year-old “disastrous son” and philosophy teacher in a secondary school in Madrid, disillusioned to the power of 10, Toni sees himself “as a dying man without health problems” .
Therefore, in a year, the 50-year-old decided that he would take his own life. As a final proof of its insignificance, it will note until its expiration date what happens to it and tell us ad-lib memories of his life. It is the starting point ofBirds of passagethe tenth novel by Fernando Aramburu.
Divorced for ten years, after sixteen years of a marriage in the form of an “ice age”, his ex-wife having decided to assume his homosexuality – a narrative element which avoids the character to examine his own faults – , our man has long since given up on love.
“Life does not please me,” he wrote. However beautiful she may be, according to certain singers or poets, I don’t like her. […] I find life to be a perverse invention, ill-conceived, and even more ill-executed. »
As a teacher, he came back from everything. “What’s the point of wracking your brains if you have machines with artificial intelligence? His prognosis is black. “These young people will end up cheering for any form of tyranny. He bursts the illusions of his students: “There is no immortal soul. There is neither heaven nor hell. There is neither God nor the word of God. »
Unsurprisingly, all that now interests him in teaching is the salary he receives from it. The philosophy ? Look at the definition he gives of it, with an ounce of bad faith: “Statement + complicated language = philosophy. »
To keep him afloat, there are only his little dog Pepa and his encounters at the bar with his only friend, whom he unwittingly nicknames Pattarsouille, as alone as he is but who, despite the loss of a leg in Madrid attacks in 2004, remains jovial and good-natured. His sex life? A Japanese-made inflatable doll spares him paid sex and the “guilty conscience of being a link in a chain of human exploitation”.
While Águeda, a former fiancée with an ungrateful physique but very pretty feet, tries to get closer to him and Pattarsouille (with his big dog who answers to the name of… Toni), the hero of this tragicomedy cleans up his apartment, puts his affairs in order, disseminates his library day by day on park benches. All this while tweaking her childhood memories, those of her disastrous marriage and those of her eventful divorce.
After Fatherland (Actes Sud, 2018), a big novel that tackled the issue of terrorism head-on and recounted the raw wounds of the Spanish Basque Country, Fernando Aramburu sends us a report before liquidation.
Despite some nuggets, Birds of passage remains full of fat, sometimes stringy, and much too long. But bloated with the minute details of the existence of any man, the novel is not as caustic as one might think. It is, in the end, a beautiful ode to friendship and, whatever Toni would think, a celebration of life.