Basque Ghosts: A Review of Gabriel Urza’s First Novel — ”All That Followed”
by Gregg Chadwick Author Gabriel Urza’s family has roots in Spain’s Basque region. His new novel “All That Followed” http://amzn.to/2eyXpMY shows us the faces of civil wars — the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's, the Basque separatist movement, and the small wars that families and couples often find themselves fighting. Urza recounts a fictional tale based on real events that explores the kidnapping and killing of a young politician by even younger separatists in the late 1990s. Urza limns a town where everyone knows where bullet holes were left by Franco’s murderous thugs decades before. Ghosts of the murdered seem to arrive in the slanted rain — txirimiri in Basque. In a Rashomon like retelling of the politician’s murder, three disparate voices speak in alternating chapters: Joni, an aging American expat teacher. Mariana, the victim’s young wife. And Iker, a student activist turned abductor. Joni and Mariana’s pain and loss are balanced with Iker’s hunger for ...