«explicar lo desconocido». De Luis Buñuel a Max Aub: películas, novelas y (auto)biografías

Taking as a starting point some recent publications about Max Aub and Luis Buñuel, I will discuss some keys to the puzzle that justifies their relationship and various movements in exile, its multiple motives and consequences. To shed some light I will refer to the best known example of truth manipulation, Aub’s novel Jusep Torres Cam- palans, which is presented as the (fictional) biography of an avant-garde painter born from Aub’s imagination. He subtitled the book on Buñuel as a novel, because he wanted to be as close as possible to the truth, since what is invented about a character or the facts surrounding his life are much better to know about him than real documents. Aub’s opinion about the reliability of history is important, the confusion with fiction, and it is something very characteristic of his so-called apocryphal novels.