ANA, a journalism student, isn’t quite sure what to do. She’s been assigned her final thesis on Pío Baroja, a surly and grumpy writer who didn’t get along with life — and life didn’t get along with him — and who even seems to have supported the Franco regime, yet was a genius with the pen. What begins as “the initial punishment” will gradually turn into the discovery of an essential author in 20th-century Spain, marked by the Third Carlist War and other conflicts of the late 19th century, as well as two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the dictatorship in the 20th. All of this only confirmed what Baroja believed: that human beings are a disaster for themselves.
With ANA’s help, we will travel through parts of the life, works, and key moments of this great writer — dark, sullen, and full of contradictions; an anarchist to some, staunchly right-wing to others — who bound himself to no one but himself.
Álvaro Lión-Deprete
Miguel Ángel Calvo Buttini
