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A review by jennyshank
All That Followed by Gabriel Urza
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