The 150th anniversary of the birth of Pío Baroja –which is celebrated today– should serve to reread the writer and rediscover the character, although the latter is not an easy task in the case of the "humble and wandering man". The university professor Francisco Javier González Martín defined him as a "frontier man", who lived in the "permanent duality of contents and trajectories", which is why the works that today recall the Basque author go from white to black when it comes to draw his portrait. The consensus is much greater when analyzing his work and his exceptional literary influence, "a revolution in Spanish narrative", as defined by Eduardo Mendoza.
The Itzea family mansion, in the Navarrese town of Bera de Bidasoa, is still the property and residence of the descendants of an unrepeatable saga such as the Baroja, although its doors are generally closed to Barojians who come to the Country of Bidasoa to discover its universe.
Joaquín Ciáurriz is a legal advisor to companies from Pamplona who became a publisher because of his love for Baroja. He visited Itzea in order to scrutinize the Barojian universe, although he finally chose to do it together with 26 other writers. Why 26? “It is the number in which Itzea is located, which is a reference for the followers of Baroja. Whenever you go around, you see someone hanging around, and it is an incentive that has enriched the world of Pío Baroja”, he explains.
In the Baroja and I collection, 26 writers recount in as many works their relationship with the Basque author. They write about the writer and about the person, without hiding an obvious attraction to “the Barojan spirit”. These works constitute a good guide to get closer, on this 150th anniversary, to the author of Aurora Roja On the literary level, Bernardo Atxaga values his commitment to "look at the popular" in the face of "a literature in which the supposedly aristocratic register has dominated ”. An aspect that makes Baroja "a more current writer than most of the writers of the 20th century."
Eduardo Mendoza, for his part, saw in Baroja "the possibility of getting out of two bottlenecks: the realist novel of the 19th century and the experimental novel of the postwar period." Regarding the non-Barojian style, in his contribution to Baroja y yo he intuits "a more thoughtful technique than it appears" and, ultimately, "a dissimulation" that revolutionized the narrative.
Other authors such as Jon Juaristi highlight in their contributions the influence of Don Pío on their performance as writers: "Thanks to Baroja I understood that literature is a way of living, that is, of cheating death, and I learned to imagine in the literary way ”. Raúl Guerra Garrido, recently deceased, had confessed the attraction that "his vital force and his freedom" caused him.
Carmen Caro Baroja, the author's great-niece, attends these days "very impressed" to the commemorative acts of the 150th anniversary of the author's birth and highlights "the validity" of his work. "The public continues to connect with Baroja, with an amazing variety of characters and with stories so everyday that anyone can identify with them," she says. Joaquín Ciáurriz insists on the validity of his great publications: “His works by him have aged very well. I just became a grandfather and I plan to read Shanti Andía's concerns to my grandson".
Baroja's indisputable literary contribution, however, is difficult to dissociate from the person and the character. In the case of Itzea's genius, the visions of his personality go from one extreme to the other, perhaps because of that "borderline" personality mentioned by Francisco Javier González Martín in Baroja and I. The ephemeris should not serve to hide that other "being dark” portrayed by some of the writers who have studied and dissected him in their publications, especially in the case of Eduardo Gil Bera, Miguel Sánchez Ostiz and Víctor Moreno.
In their contributions to the Basque writer, they portray an ideological totalitarian and a tormented and resentful being personally. These works, in any case, do not discuss the exceptional contribution that he made in the more than 100 works of his. Joaquín Ciáurriz refutes and contextualizes some of the ideas that are contributed in the works of the aforementioned authors, although, above all, he prefers to stay with the "sensitivity" that captivated him in the descriptions of Zalacaín the adventurer "They made me delve a lot into that novelist lonely, skeptical and misanthropic —when he wanted to—, but with an enormous sensitivity, almost unhealthy, that many of his contemporaries and detractors failed to appreciate”, he concludes.
