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  • La jauría y la niebla
  • Joanne Lucena
Casariego, Martín . La jauría y la niebla. Sevilla: Algaida, 2009. Pp. 314. ISBN 978-84-9877-189-3.

Martín Casariego's latest novel, La jauría y la niebla, winner of the Segundo Premio Logroño de Novela, is a fascinating study of the lives of three disparate characters during one December day in a small Basque town. Forteen-year-old Ander is tormented and bullied by his classmates; Leandro, Ander's younger brother, discovers that the three wise kings do not exist; and Ignacio Mayor, an elderly writer, is filled with doubts about his own self-worth while talking to a class of schoolchildren. The novel skillfully alternates between the three distinct narratives, all related in third person. Both Leandro and Ander meet Ignacio, and these incidents are recounted in both the children's and the adult's narration from their different perspectives. Casariego's intention is to draw the reader's attention to Basque extremism and terrorism by creating a novel that denounces bullying on any level. The bullying of schoolchildren and their harassment at the hands of their peers is parallel to that which the Basque citizens suffer at the hands of extremists, some of whom are their peers. This parallelism is very subtle, so, if the reader is looking for a direct condemnation of events, he or she would not cite this text but rather those of Fernando Aramburu and his Peces de la amargura, El zulo de los elegidos by Manuel Villar Raso, or Y Dios en la última playa by Cristóbal Zaragoza. Nevertheless, this certainly does not diminish the novel's value and makes it more universal in scope because it encompasses the theme of [End Page 554] different manifestations of terrorism. ETA is still a salient theme in Spanish society today. Even though the Basque terrorist group has supposedly agreed to a cease fire, their prior draconian methods of assassination and subsequent losses suffered by Basque and Spanish citizens plays a significant part in contemporary Spanish politics.

Although seemingly contrasting, the three protagonists all suffer a loss of innocence over the course of a single, ordinary day. Ander cannot understand why his peers suddenly turn against him and then continually bully him to the point of torture in the space of three months. On the day in which the story takes place, their final act of cruelty is to put anchovy heads between the pages of his textbook. As a result, the once outgoing teen loses considerable weight and turns into an individual who is introverted, introspective, and depressed. Leandro, upon learning that the three wise kings are really adults/parents in disguise, suffers his first loss of childhood innocence, which, in turn, causes him to question other things that he has been told. Ignacio, a writer from Madrid, realizes that no one knows his work, and that neither the young students in the Basque country nor their professor express much interest in what he has to say, nor have they read the book that he is signing for them.

Regarding the eldest of this novel's three protagonist, the two most compelling moments in Ignacio's day occur, first, when Ander asks him if he is happy, and then later, when Leandro, in a different scene, asks him if the three wise kings really exist. In response to the latter, Ignacio tells him to ask his parents. Of all the questions posed by the students, Ander's is the one that causes Ignacio the most introspection and self-doubt. But the old writer's tribulations do not end there. In another scene, Ignacio is filled with enthusiasm because he hopes to rekindle a harmless flirtation with Irene, the conference organizer whom he has known for some time and with whom he has corresponded in writing. Irene informs Ignacio that she will not be able to call him again because he comes from Madrid, he is not Basque, and he does not write in Basque. Irene insists that if the Basques do not take such drastic measures, their language, Euskera, might disappear. Casariego artfully depicts Ignacio's disappointment and...

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