Fernando Aramburu: A Journey Through Germany with Clara. review – culture

Of course you can also write a book about the “German spirit” (Thea Dorn) or a book about hiking in the Harz mountains (Heinrich Heine). But exploring Germany in this way is also a very German thing. Then there are meticulously researched specialist books about West German society or books that gather clichés about Germany and are meant to be funny (which are also completely German). Nothing does it justice in Germany like the novel that Fernando Aramburu recently translated.

The Spanish writer, who meanwhile spent more years of his life in Germany than in Spain (and then also in Hanover), took a different approach and wrote A Journey Through Germany with Clara. It’s more like a series of flights into northern Germany than the Grand Republic Tour. Clara is a teacher who wants to become a writer. And Mouse, her husband and first-person narrator, lovingly and jokingly watch the Woman Writer fail in their joint search for a new book. Here Don Quixote and Sancho Panza travel through Germany and are at least as obsessed with literature as the genius Juncker of La Mancha.

The plot is supposed to be as flat as the country the two pass through. From Aramburu as author of The great Spanish social novel “Pateria”. Met, in which he tells of Basque nationalism with strength and sympathy for his heroes, will rub his eyes. Is this the same author?

Yes it is. A Journey with Clara Through Germany was written six years before Patria and may now be published in German because Aramburu has made a name for himself with his major work in Germany and the publisher is now exploring which of his earlier works might be attractive to public access. It is not impudent to predict that “the journey with Clara through Germany” should not be one of them. This, in turn, is due at least as much to the audience as to the writers. A note to all frustrated fans: a rescue is at hand. Who loved Patria?You will even enjoy the latest Aramburu novels. “Los Vencejos” (German: The Swifts) was released in Spain last August and is much closer to “Patria” in terms of narrative, this time only Madrid being the focus.

But if you appreciate Aramburu and want to understand what you are dealing with here a mischievous and absolutely immoral author, then “The Journey” is also recommended. Not because you learn something about hate and major social struggles here (you also do by the way), but because Aramburu calibrates his moral compass in the novel, allowing him to write “Patria” without taking sides in the Basque conflict.

in his youth In the Basque Country It was messy, Aramburu told a reporter recently Country. It was a devastating stage and he was one of those who called themselves the rebels because they made fun of things other people did. Only when he read Camus was he cleansed and showed him what he and his companions were like at the time: “parasites.”

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This mess caught on again on A Journey Through Germany with Clara. The first-person narrator in Aramburu lives completely parasitic next to the “female writer”. This Ungustl cannot help but make fun of everything, especially German national symbolism. On the chalk cliffs of Rügen, the “little mouse” could think of nothing better than to empty his bladder and comment on this with romantic tenderness: “And then, really only, I cast my gaze into the depths of the abyss and through the fine mesh of the fence I saw through the beam of lightning, in his state It describes a shimmering arc that came out mightily from my body and split into smaller and smaller drops until it exploded ten or fifteen meters below me in an unrecognizable barrage of drops whose sea breeze blows at will and mood vanishes. Before I left, I bowed to the sea. Thank you, Germany” .

The fact that “Maus” isn’t popular and that the novel falls into a rocky episodic nature doesn’t make it easy for readers. But it is always worth following this narrator, who often turns out to be a vulgar, through this “gray country” with its “gray people”. Because in the end, through the eyes of an incarnated Sancho Panza, one can catch a new look at what has been travelled. Perhaps not necessarily for the German spirit, but for a country that this ironic declaration of love does justice to. Because the cliché was finally confirmed: when it comes to sarcasm, the Spaniards are way ahead of the Germans.