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roboxa's review against another edition
3.0
Originally posted on Roberta's Literary Ramblings
Overall Impression: A decent book that I kind of expected a little more out of, but not a total disappointment.
Recommend for: Fans of literary fiction and character-center stories.
The book ended up not being what I expected, which disappointed me a little. I thought that there was going to be a little more intrigue than there was. Instead the book focuses more on the lives of the people that have to do with the tragedy, both directly and indirectly. I would go further into this line of thought, but then I would be in spoiler territory, and we don't want that. I will just say that it was a little underwhelming. However, I believe that if you go into this book with a realistic expectation of the level of intrigue and go into it knowing that it is more of an examination of three people that were directly affected by the murder, I think you would enjoy the book a little more. I think that this is where most of my disappointment lies with this book.
However, while lofty expectations was one of my major issues with this book, it wasn't the only one. We see from the point of view of three people. All of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds. Yet all of them sounded the same. I couldn't find any distinctive language that made one voice standout from the others. I had to keep reminding myself who was talking when it came to sections when the stories intersected. Fortunately, the chapters were rather short, so this didn't cause major headache while reading, but these characters are so different from one another that I would expect them to talk differently.
Because of this, it made it a little difficult for me to become fully invested in the characters. They felt a little flat on the page which was disappointing, since they seemed to have some pretty interesting backstories. Maybe if the book were a little longer this would have allowed for more examination of the characters. As it is, the lack of distinctive voices makes it really difficult to connect to them and thus difficult to really care about their lives.
It was also difficult to see the growth in these characters over the years. The flashbacks focused more on the actual events happening rather than who they were as people, so we didn't really see any difference between their characters then and now. This was mostly a problem with Mariana since her flashbacks were more numerous than the present day sections, and we didn't learn much about how events changed her in the present. The main focus was on her life right before and during the kidnapping and murder of her husband. There's nothing much about her before this, like there is with Joni, and nothing much after, like there is with Iker. She's only really seen during one point in time, and nothing much happens with her character developmentally during that time. She falls a little flat.
Overall, it was an okay book, but it could have been a lot better.
Overall Impression: A decent book that I kind of expected a little more out of, but not a total disappointment.
Recommend for: Fans of literary fiction and character-center stories.
The book ended up not being what I expected, which disappointed me a little. I thought that there was going to be a little more intrigue than there was. Instead the book focuses more on the lives of the people that have to do with the tragedy, both directly and indirectly. I would go further into this line of thought, but then I would be in spoiler territory, and we don't want that. I will just say that it was a little underwhelming. However, I believe that if you go into this book with a realistic expectation of the level of intrigue and go into it knowing that it is more of an examination of three people that were directly affected by the murder, I think you would enjoy the book a little more. I think that this is where most of my disappointment lies with this book.
However, while lofty expectations was one of my major issues with this book, it wasn't the only one. We see from the point of view of three people. All of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds. Yet all of them sounded the same. I couldn't find any distinctive language that made one voice standout from the others. I had to keep reminding myself who was talking when it came to sections when the stories intersected. Fortunately, the chapters were rather short, so this didn't cause major headache while reading, but these characters are so different from one another that I would expect them to talk differently.
Because of this, it made it a little difficult for me to become fully invested in the characters. They felt a little flat on the page which was disappointing, since they seemed to have some pretty interesting backstories. Maybe if the book were a little longer this would have allowed for more examination of the characters. As it is, the lack of distinctive voices makes it really difficult to connect to them and thus difficult to really care about their lives.
It was also difficult to see the growth in these characters over the years. The flashbacks focused more on the actual events happening rather than who they were as people, so we didn't really see any difference between their characters then and now. This was mostly a problem with Mariana since her flashbacks were more numerous than the present day sections, and we didn't learn much about how events changed her in the present. The main focus was on her life right before and during the kidnapping and murder of her husband. There's nothing much about her before this, like there is with Joni, and nothing much after, like there is with Iker. She's only really seen during one point in time, and nothing much happens with her character developmentally during that time. She falls a little flat.
Overall, it was an okay book, but it could have been a lot better.
igneousrockk's review against another edition
3.5
Pros
-story that wants you to read more/suspenseful
-twists and turns
Cons
-slow start
-writing style is a little confusing with time period changes
-some parts of plot seemed to be forced
-story that wants you to read more/suspenseful
-twists and turns
Cons
-slow start
-writing style is a little confusing with time period changes
-some parts of plot seemed to be forced
stacialithub's review against another edition
5.0
“He had been asking me for the Basque translations of peculiar words like these since the first day we met. He spoke Euskera well, but his vocabulary had holes in it, lacking, for example, a whole range of words that dealt with pain or toil, as if his family home where he had learned his Basque was free entirely of grief, or tenderness, or aching.”
I think grief, and tenderness, and aching reach the core of this haunting and riveting story told through three different narrators. Quite brilliant and highly recommended.
jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
Dallas Morning News, 14 August 2015 10:56 PM
Forest fires in the wilderness can burn all winter, deep under the cover of snow. Old wars, too, can smolder for decades, even centuries, after a truce. The sorrowful memories passed to each successive generation can be so robust they may well be encoded into people’s DNA.
So it is for the characters in Gabriel Urza’s sharp and melancholy debut novel, All That Followed, where Basque people in Spain are still fighting against the ideas of the Franco regime, even though his rule ended with his 1975 death.
Urza, an American of Basque ancestry, works as a public defender in Reno, Nev., a fact that makes the deft circular structure of All That Followed even more striking. A terrible crime lies at the novel’s heart, but Urza doesn’t build up to it for suspense or provide much detail about the trial that followed it. Instead, he’s interested in the intersecting lives and the character of the town itself that fomented a killing, and he reaches back as far as 1939 to tell the story. As layers of the characters’ lives are revealed, it appears they are following old patterns they aren’t fully aware of.
All That Followed has three narrators: Joni, an elderly American who has taught English at a school in Muriga, Spain, for 50 years; his friend Mariana, a young mother raised in the town who received a transplanted kidney she believes is from a deceased member of the violent pro-Basque separatist group ETA; and Iker, one of several young men with Basque nationalist views involved in a plot that killed Mariana’s husband, José Antonio Torres, in 1998.
The chapters are brief and crisp, written in prose that has a timeless quality, each ending with a detail that keeps you reading to find out the next piece of the puzzle, the next clue to the many secrets underlying these lives.
Mariana had left the sleepy town of Muriga to attend college in Bilbao, where she met José Antonio, became pregnant, and then returned home. In Bilbao, they didn’t dwell on their political differences — José Antonio supported the conservative Partido Popular and eventually takes a job with them.
“But it was different in Muriga, where our parents and grandparents had been forbidden to speak their native language for nearly half a century and had lost so many of their artists and politicians and intellectuals forever in Franco’s prisons and graveyards,” Mariana explains. “Working for the PP in Muriga would only guarantee that José Antonio would be treated as an outsider, something he had complained about since we’d arrived in August.”
José Antonio becomes a campaign manager in Bilbao, leaving Mariana and their daughter Elena alone in Muriga during the week. “This town didn’t have room for a man of ambition,” Mariana explains, “unless his idea of ambition was leaving at 3:30 each morning on the sardine boats, or working in a video store, or depositing pension checks for ninety-year-old widowers.”
For decades, the teenagers of Muriga have played at being radical Basque revolutionaries as a sort of rite of passage. They occasionally don black bandanas and raise a ruckus — usually harmlessly. The townspeople tolerate this display because of their history. “We were just kids playing a game,” Iker explains from his prison cell, “the same game that the shopkeepers played each time they shut their storm doors or scrubbed away graffiti. This would go on and on until, inevitably, one team or another broke the rules.”
When some of the more radical teens learn that a right-wing politician is living in Muriga, they immediately begin to watch him, calling him “The Councilman.” When an ETA-connected young man arrives, their activities turn grave.
Joni, meanwhile, will always be an outsider to Muriga because he doesn’t speak Basque, but he still holds the town’s institutional memory and knows the connections between everyone. His late wife’s father was executed in 1939, and Joni thinks “perhaps that bullet has never stopped moving through our town. That it is still traveling through Muriga, striking one of us down every now and again.”
Just as the Confederate flag remains a source of contention in America 150 years after the end of the Civil War, and as farmers in France continue to unearth landmines from World War I, the suffering of the Basque people under Franco remains palpable to today’s Basques. “If there is one thing we’re taught in Muriga, it’s that we owe something to our histories,” Iker says.
This elegant novel makes the story of a conflict and people little known to Americans clear and poignant through its portraits of spare lives caught up in the irrevocable patterns set by history.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20150814-fiction-review-all-that-followed-by-gabriel-urza.ece
Forest fires in the wilderness can burn all winter, deep under the cover of snow. Old wars, too, can smolder for decades, even centuries, after a truce. The sorrowful memories passed to each successive generation can be so robust they may well be encoded into people’s DNA.
So it is for the characters in Gabriel Urza’s sharp and melancholy debut novel, All That Followed, where Basque people in Spain are still fighting against the ideas of the Franco regime, even though his rule ended with his 1975 death.
Urza, an American of Basque ancestry, works as a public defender in Reno, Nev., a fact that makes the deft circular structure of All That Followed even more striking. A terrible crime lies at the novel’s heart, but Urza doesn’t build up to it for suspense or provide much detail about the trial that followed it. Instead, he’s interested in the intersecting lives and the character of the town itself that fomented a killing, and he reaches back as far as 1939 to tell the story. As layers of the characters’ lives are revealed, it appears they are following old patterns they aren’t fully aware of.
All That Followed has three narrators: Joni, an elderly American who has taught English at a school in Muriga, Spain, for 50 years; his friend Mariana, a young mother raised in the town who received a transplanted kidney she believes is from a deceased member of the violent pro-Basque separatist group ETA; and Iker, one of several young men with Basque nationalist views involved in a plot that killed Mariana’s husband, José Antonio Torres, in 1998.
The chapters are brief and crisp, written in prose that has a timeless quality, each ending with a detail that keeps you reading to find out the next piece of the puzzle, the next clue to the many secrets underlying these lives.
Mariana had left the sleepy town of Muriga to attend college in Bilbao, where she met José Antonio, became pregnant, and then returned home. In Bilbao, they didn’t dwell on their political differences — José Antonio supported the conservative Partido Popular and eventually takes a job with them.
“But it was different in Muriga, where our parents and grandparents had been forbidden to speak their native language for nearly half a century and had lost so many of their artists and politicians and intellectuals forever in Franco’s prisons and graveyards,” Mariana explains. “Working for the PP in Muriga would only guarantee that José Antonio would be treated as an outsider, something he had complained about since we’d arrived in August.”
José Antonio becomes a campaign manager in Bilbao, leaving Mariana and their daughter Elena alone in Muriga during the week. “This town didn’t have room for a man of ambition,” Mariana explains, “unless his idea of ambition was leaving at 3:30 each morning on the sardine boats, or working in a video store, or depositing pension checks for ninety-year-old widowers.”
For decades, the teenagers of Muriga have played at being radical Basque revolutionaries as a sort of rite of passage. They occasionally don black bandanas and raise a ruckus — usually harmlessly. The townspeople tolerate this display because of their history. “We were just kids playing a game,” Iker explains from his prison cell, “the same game that the shopkeepers played each time they shut their storm doors or scrubbed away graffiti. This would go on and on until, inevitably, one team or another broke the rules.”
When some of the more radical teens learn that a right-wing politician is living in Muriga, they immediately begin to watch him, calling him “The Councilman.” When an ETA-connected young man arrives, their activities turn grave.
Joni, meanwhile, will always be an outsider to Muriga because he doesn’t speak Basque, but he still holds the town’s institutional memory and knows the connections between everyone. His late wife’s father was executed in 1939, and Joni thinks “perhaps that bullet has never stopped moving through our town. That it is still traveling through Muriga, striking one of us down every now and again.”
Just as the Confederate flag remains a source of contention in America 150 years after the end of the Civil War, and as farmers in France continue to unearth landmines from World War I, the suffering of the Basque people under Franco remains palpable to today’s Basques. “If there is one thing we’re taught in Muriga, it’s that we owe something to our histories,” Iker says.
This elegant novel makes the story of a conflict and people little known to Americans clear and poignant through its portraits of spare lives caught up in the irrevocable patterns set by history.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20150814-fiction-review-all-that-followed-by-gabriel-urza.ece
lizz6a11's review against another edition
1.0
Literally not a single point to this book at all. I kept waiting to learn a secret or plot line twist and nothing.
sarahpottenger's review against another edition
2.0
*sigh* Books like this are why I read so little literary fiction anymore. It just meanders, and anything promising/intriguing either fell to the wayside or had nothing to do with the book's events. The sense of place was wonderful, and I loved the glimpse into Basque culture. But I was frequently asking myself what the point was, because there seemed to be a lack of focus.
abookishtype's review against another edition
4.0
Sometimes I wish I lived in Europe or Asia or Africa, some place that’s soaked in human history. North America has its history, of course. It’s just not my history; my ancestors came from thousands of miles. I often wonder what it would be like to live somewhere where my family has lived for centuries. I wonder what it would be like to point to an old building and know that it’s been around longer than the United States, with a history of good and bad events as it has been adapted over the years. Gabriel Urza’s All that Followed has set me to wondering again. The novel is narrated by three voices, all inhabitants of Muriga, in the Basque Country. Mariana is a returned Basque, whose husband was murdered for his politics. Iker is a native Basque, one of the murderers, who was sucked into separatist rhetoric. Joni is an American who has lived in Muriga longer than most of the other characters have been alive. The murdered politician is the wheel hub around which the plot of this book spins, but All that Followed is very much about those who are still alive...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.
kaybee435b2's review
4.0
Very glad to receive this fascinating book as part of an early readers program. It was not immediately engaging to follow the author's nuances and rhythms as he establishes three characters' first-person narratives, told in turn by alternating chapters. But the story evolves masterfully and the character's lives in the setting of a small Basque town are engrossing and complex. Of the three, a councilman’s young widow, the teenager jailed for the councilman's murder, and an aging American teacher, I found the teacher to be especially well-drawn.
pagesofkelsey's review
3.0
Another book I'm struggling on the star ratings for. This book was fascinating because of the political intrigue in a part of the world I'm very unfamiliar with (Basque country/Spain), but I never got the emotional connection to any of the three POV characters (save Iker, perhaps). But 1/3 isn't really good enough.
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