Demetrio Aguilera-Malta: Los que se van: inicios y retornos

Abstract

The author looks at Aguilera-Malta’s stories in Los que se van. She maintains that they anticipate the content and traits of his later fiction, constituting a true «octaemeron of human passions». Complex existential feelings animate the characters: friendship taken to its limits; self deception related to love; self forgiveness of old guilts; a «Don Juan» of the islands that suddenly, upon finding love for the first time, punishes the evil that dominates him by self mutilation and death (Evil being intrinsic and extrinsic at the same time). A complex structure, precocious mastery of form, economy in narrative resources, clear sense of fabulation: all of these elements, present in his later fiction, are in evidence in the stories included in Los que se van.