Homeland (Patria)

"Patria has been the biggest hit in Spanish literature, with over a million copies sold. And it’s an 800-page book! The easy blurb is that this is the Spanish War and Peace . It’s set in a very small town in the Basque Country and it’s about ETA and the ETA period—ETA being the Basque separatist terrorist movement that ran a violent campaign between 1960 and the ceasefire in 2010 that prompts the narrative of Patria . It’s the story of two families who are both unhappy in their own way. And it’s about the relationship between them. The book starts on the day the ceasefire is declared in 2011 . The father of one family was murdered, we think by ETA, although we’re not sure. The police didn’t investigate. Because the father was assassinated, the family had to move out of their hometown and went to live in San Sebastián. But on the day of the ceasefire, the widow picks up her stuff and moves back to her flat in this small community. And everybody in the village is like, ‘How dare she move back?’ It’s out of that scenario that we get flashbacks as to what’s happened between these two families because of the conflict. It’s about how, when this terrible event happens, it messes up the kids of this family. I think the parallels to Ireland are really interesting. There’s something universal about conflict, and especially an ideological conflict. Everybody is deeply ideological, but at the same time, they’re not quite sure why. They’re like, “I don’t quite know why I’m going to murder you, but I am going to murder you.” That’s writ very large in this book. It’s really wonderful. It’s incredibly moving and very beautifully written. Class comes into it because the guy who gets murdered has his own factory. If you were earning money, there was a ‘revolutionary tax’ which meant giving a certain percentage of your income to ETA to show your support. The father refused, and that’s why he got murdered. It is universal in terms of a conflict going on that is painted as ideological. ETA essentially started as an uprising against Franco as well as for Basque nationalism. When the transition happened, that became ideologically much more difficult to sustain. Lots of people thought, ‘Why can’t we all just get on?’—which is the attitude of the guy who gets murdered. From that point of view, the book is relatively easy to understand. One of the things I didn’t realize was quite how brutal it was. Foundry Editions has just brought out a book, Spanish Beauty , that I translated, by Esther García Llovet. She told me her father had owned factories in Bilbao in the early 1970s, but he got car-bombed one night. They had to leave Bilbao the next morning, absolutely no questions asked, and settle in Madrid, which is where she grew up. When you’re not in a zone where internecine strife is going on, you pay attention when there’s a big attack, but you don’t really understand what it means to live there. That’s what Aramburu does amazingly well, showing what it was like."