Pio Baroja's character was introverted and shy, being himself a somewhat lonely person. In radical discontent with the rules of society, in his youth, he had shown traits of a radical and nonconformist. From the anarchism of his youth, he always had an iconoclastic position that makes him feel a certain degree of hostility towards society. He plainly confessed not to believe in God nor in the good of in life. He used to say that life is just cruelty, ingratitude, and strength's disdain for weakness. The individual he considered a harmful, envious, cruel, and perfidious animal, full of low passions. All this said, there is in Baroja a deep tenderness for the underprivileged and marginalized, affirming that he would not bring happiness to the world if he had to make a child cry for it. His absolute sincerity, not deceiving anyone nor deceiving himself, is the basis of his personal morality. Despite the feeling of hopelessness being such a marked feature of his character, he always felt a great longing for action, opposing improvisation and energy to a bourgeois and shallow life.

The novel was for Baroja a miscellaneous container where everything fits, always starting to write a book with no closed and definitive argument. In a way, his novels are too realistic and objective, with a fairly open and fragmentary narrative, built on the base of the dialogues of his characters.

.His are open novels, where episodes, anecdotes, and digressions are juxtaposed. Characters appear and disappear in them. The content of the novel produces in the readers a sense of familiarity something that has happened or been seen in real life, of something that has been lived. His descriptions are quick with expressive and safe features, as the narration of an eyewitness. This is because Baroja always tries to reflect life in all its spontaneity. The heroes in whom  Baroja projects his feelings are misfit beings on the edge of society, habitually confronted with its rules, they are nonconformists who fight and rebel for a change in society and to find a reason to live, being somehow characters tired of living and without hope. In other cases, the characters are frustrated, simply toys of the circumstances. Notwithstanding,  this improvisation and fast constructed narrative his writings contain highly engaging adventures, anecdotes, and even the development of philosophical and psychological themes.

El árbol de la ciencia

Zalacain el aventurero

Camino de perfección

La Busca

Miserias de la guerra

Mala hierba

Aurora roja

La ciudad de la niebla

El árbol de la ciencia narrates the life of Andrés Hurtado until his death by suicide. The central theme of the book is the existential disorientation of the maladjusted man.

Narrative

The Generation of '98 is made up of a series of writers who respond with their literary works to the tragic awareness of decline that is perceived in Spain at the end of the 19th century. In 1895 began the rebellion of the overseas colonies against the metropolis. The decisive intervention of the United States in favor of the colonies, particularly in Cuba, forces Spain to sign the Treaty of Paris, by which it abandons what was left of its old empire. Human and economic losses will go down in history under the name of "Disaster of 98". 

The founding nucleus of writers from the Generation of '98 is made up of Azorín, Pío Baroja, and Ramiro de Maeztu. Autodidacticism and their religious heterodoxy are some of the traits that most identify them, in addition to their revolutionary ideas and their admiration for similar philosophers of the time. They will be joined by Unamuno, Antonio Machado, and Valle-Inclán. All of them are concerned about the politics of the moment, the historical problems of Spain, and its desire for Europeanization. 

From an aesthetic point of view, his style is characterized by a sustained opposition to traditional rhetoric, as well as a taste for the use of traditional speaking in their writings. The subjectivist character of the literary movement impregnates these authors' works with an intense subjectivism, notably in their descriptions of the Castilian landscape, where what is seen is inseparable from the way of looking, fusing landscape with their soul in an intense combination of reality and sensitivity.

Generation of '98

Antonio Machado publishes his collection of poems Soldedades, galerias y otros poemas.

Azorín publishes Castilla, a book that represents the quintessence of Azorín's work, contemplating the landscape as a "small" story passed through time and seeking in literature an expression of the national spirit.

Antonio Machado publishes Campos de Castilla, a book that includes a mixture of poems, proverbs and a romance, in which the autor captures the tark landscape and spirit of Castile.

José Ortega y Gasset prublishes Meditaciones del Quijote, a profound introspection on the universal meaning of life.

Miguel de Unamuno publishes his novel Niebla, a story of impossible love that explores the confusion of existence.

Juan Ramón Jiménez publishes Platero y yo, a prose poem about his homeland in Andalusia, tells the story of a man and his donkey.

Ortega y Gasset publishes La deshumanización del arte, a philosophical book in which he alludes to avant-garde art and literature (the “isms”) that emerged after the First World War.

Rafael Alberty publishes Marinero en tierra, where the poet recovers the memory of the immediacy of the sea in his childhood.

Marcel Proust publishes In Search of Lost Time, the story of Proust's own life, told as an allegorical search for truth.

Frank Kafka publishes The Metamorphosis, the life struggles of a man that wakes up one morning inexplicably transform into a huge insect.

Herman Hesse publishes Demian, a demonic hero who rejects Chistian morality with contempt.

The play Six Characters in Search of an author, by Luigi Pirandello is performed for the first time. The work is an aburdist methatheatrical play in which the caracters claim that they are incomplete creations of an author who couldn't finish the work for which they were conceived. 

Rainer Maria Rilke publishes his collectionof then elegies,Duino Elegies, a loud cry out of his solitude.

Italo Calvino publishes Zeno's Conscience, a novel about a neurotic Italian businessman.

World economic crisis starts in New York.

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El árbol de la ciencia. (1911)

By Pio Baroja Nessi

Time Period: Generation of '98

Genre: Narrative

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