Reviews of Books

Abstract

Francisco Fuster's Aire de familia: Historia íntima de los Baroja is a welcome recent addition to biographical scholarship and cultural histories of the Baroja family and its legacy in Spain, not least because existing surveys have tended to vary in quality and accuracy. This problem has been compounded by the transposition from fiction inspired by personal experience back to autobiography in Pío Baroja's own memoirs Desde la última vuelta del camino, which the author began writing in 1941 when he was in his late sixties.Fuster's Aire de familia presents an evocative portrait of a well-known family of individualists, descendants of the mining engineer Serafín Baroja y Zornoza and his wife Carmen Nessi y Goñi. The volume eschews a dry, chronological account in favour of a thematic and anecdotal exploration of the family's peripatetic movements between San Sebastián, Madrid, Pamplona and Valencia, where they lost their eldest son Darío to tuberculosis in 1894. This episode was transposed to semi-autobiographical fiction in Pío Baroja's El árbol de la ciencia through the death of the protagonist Andrés' youngest brother Luisito, thereby changing the name and age of the sibling. Subsequent chapters of Fuster's book trace the experiences of the couple's offspring: 'El náufrago Ricardo Baroja', 'Las inquietudes de Pío Baroja' and 'Las vidas (im)posibles de Carmen Baroja'. The final chapters summarize the role of Julio Caro Baroja and Pío Caro Baroja, the children of Carmen Baroja and her husband Rafael Caro Raggio, in preserving the family legacy.