What We Tried to Bury Grows Here <\/p>\n
Author: Julian Zabalbeascoa<\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-1-911710-29-5<\/p>\n
Publisher: Seven Stories <\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a312.99 <\/p>\n
The Spanish Civil War was \u201ca shared madness\u201d, in the phrase of Isidro, the young man at the heart of Julian Zabalbeasco\u2019s moving debut novel, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here. As in all civil wars, including ours, the impact on ordinary people was especially traumatic. <\/p>\n
That trauma was particularly deep-rooted in the Basque Country, whose spiritual centre is Gernika, made famous by Picasso\u2019s great painting of 1937. The town\u2019s bombing by the Germans and Italians features early on, observed from a distance by Isidro, the \u201cdark eggs\u201d falling from the bombers\u2019 bellies \u201clike someone quickly tearing paper in half\u201d.<\/p>\n
Everything is torn apart in this book: families, lovers, decency and indeed the narrative itself. Zabalbeasco writes it through the voices of 20 different narrators, though he does not attempt the stylistic bravura of Donal Ryan\u2019s 21 in The Spinning Heart and its follow-up Heart Be At Peace. That would not be appropriate here. Instead, there is directness, bewilderment and pain.<\/p>\n
Such a structure risks being overly-fractured, but Zabalbeasco handles this skilfully by making Isidro the one character who features throughout, sometimes anonymously. He has stopped another fighter from shooting a captured German by putting his hand over the muzzle, and his middle and ring fingers have been blasted off. You wait each time for mention of a man with missing fingers.<\/p>\n
But Isidro\u2019s worst wounds are to come. Mariana is a young mother who writes anti-fascist pamphlets under the nom de plume Erlea. Their brief encounter in Bilbao results in the birth of a now-lost baby girl. His brother Xabier, the narrator of the fifth section, has as a priest taken a different path. When Isidro himself finally speaks, in the penultimate piece, he tells us of \u201cmy own defining story, the one that prods me still\u201d. Their father beat them both in childhood, and now Xabier has been hanged by fascists in a San Sebasti\u00e1n cemetery.<\/p>\n
Individual characters flare vividly in front of us for a few pages and then disappear into history \u2013 men, women and children, Republicans and Nationalists alike. What persists throughout is the place itself and its people. As a lieutenant says: \u201cNo people have ever been able to dislodge us. Not the Romans, not the Moors. And now Franco and his German and Italian friends are concentrating on our country. We are shooting bullets at our own sky. That\u2019s fine. We were here before, and we will remain. It is our story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Julian Girdham teaches English at St Columba\u2019s College in Dublin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What We Tried to Bury Grows Here Author: Julian Zabalbeascoa ISBN-13: 978-1-911710-29-5 Publisher: Seven Stories Guideline Price: \u00a312.99…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6489,61,60,2846,80],"class_list":["post-369257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-book-reviews","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-spain","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}