★ 04/20/2015
Set in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Urza’s debut novel is as subtle and enveloping as the txirimiri, a Basque word for “rain so fine that an umbrella is useless against it.” The village of Muriga, a Basque stronghold dominated by a “looming fortress” that was once the site of a massacre during the Spanish Civil War, is picturesque and sinister in equal measure. It is a town proud of its antifascist past but bedeviled by a strain of separatist extremism that leads several teenagers to murder a local politician. The novel is narrated by three townspeople, each providing a first-person account that cautiously circles the political crime in increasingly tight orbits: Joni, a transplanted American teacher of English, who, despite having lived in Muriga for half a century, is still considered a stranger; Mariana, the widow of the slain politician who is convinced that the ghost of her kidney donor, a young terrorist killed by the police, is haunting her; and Iker, a student of Joni’s and one of the perpetrators of the attack. Deceptions and past tragedies come to light, but most remarkable is how Urza thematically handles the violence lurking in an insular community. Be it a Basque town with its own language and history, a transplanted organ, or a nonnative inhabitant, everything in this tense novel revolves around the notion of an ineradicable foreignness that inexorably leads to bad blood. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Aug.)
All That Followed: A Novel
Narrated by Kyla Garcia, Thom Rivera, Armando Durán
Gabriel UrzaUnabridged — 8 hours, 14 minutes
All That Followed: A Novel
Narrated by Kyla Garcia, Thom Rivera, Armando Durán
Gabriel UrzaUnabridged — 8 hours, 14 minutes
Overview
A psychologically twisting novel about a politically charged act of violence that echoes through a small Spanish town; a dazzling debut in the tradition of Daniel Alarcón and Mohsin Hamid
It's 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain's northern Basque Country, a place with more secrets than inhabitants. Five years have passed since the kidnapping and murder of a young local politician-a family man and father-and the town's rhythms have almost returned to normal. But in the aftermath of the Atocha train bombings in Madrid, an act of terrorism that rocked the nation and the world, the townspeople want a reckoning of Muriga's own troubled past: everyone knows who pulled the trigger five years ago, but is the young man now behind bars the only one to blame?
All That Followed peels away the layers of a crime complicated by history, love, and betrayal. The accounts of three townspeople in particular-the councilman's beautiful young widow, the teenage radical now in jail for the crime, and an aging American teacher hiding a traumatic past of his own-hold the key to what really happened. And for these three, it's finally time to confront what they can find of the truth.
Inspired by a true story, All That Followed is a powerful, multifaceted novel about a nefarious kind of violence that can take hold when we least expect. Urgent, elegant, and gorgeously atmospheric, Urza's debut is a book for the world we live in now, and it marks the arrival of a brilliant new writer to watch.
Editorial Reviews
Gabriel Urza has written a story based on a tragedy I knew nothing about in a country I have only the most passing interest in, yet I couldn't put it down. Urza's novel of ideas and national identity feels personal and intimate, and through this intimacy, becomes universally tragic and beautiful.
A gorgeously gripping tale of secrecy, violence, and the burden of history, Gabriel Urza's All That Followed is a thrilling debut from a distinctive and powerful new voice. Atmospheric, wise, and deliciously complex this novel is as spellbinding as they come.
A ballsy, dazzling debut novel unlike anything you've ever read. Written in beautiful lean vignettes, this is at once a literary big ideas book about a nation, a people, and also highly addictive-I finished it in a day. Self-assured, bold and allergic to trends, Gabriel Urza is an absolute original.
Gabriel Urza's All that Followed is one of those rare works of fiction that peels back the surface layers of the politicized world we live in to show us the remarkable, rich lives behind the headlines. This is an eloquent, and beautifully imagined work of literature, haunting, elegiac and utterly compelling to the very end.
Intimate...This thoughtful novel will draw some literary-thriller readers, but its real strength is what it contributes to the modern-day conversation on terrorist extremism, particularly as it pertains to how youth from small, long-oppressed towns can get pulled into the fray.
More than just a mystery story....It's a meditation on how time and place dictate our deepest loyalties and cause us to do unimaginable things.
Stunning...strange and ambitious... All That Followed is a triumph--Urza delineates his characters' perspectives with remarkable care...[The novel's] chief interests are memory and perception, and the eerie multidimensionality that arises when they are layered, somewhat imperfectly, on top of each other...The characters' perceptions start to haunt our own.
06/15/2015
In this multilayered novel, told from different perspectives, the small town of Muriga in the Basque region of Spain has a turbulent history that ensnares the residents in an endless cycle of violence, revenge, and victimization. The central story concerns the events surrounding the death of a local politician, who was kidnapped and murdered by Basque political activists in the late 1990s. An American, Joni (or Johnny) Garrett, who has been in the area for 50 years and is still an outsider, is friend of Mariana, the wife of the politician. Various events in Joni's and Mariana's life are related as these two alternate first-person chapters along with Iker, a young man who was one of the kidnappers and a student of Joni's. Iker dreamed of leaving the region and making a new life for himself and his young lover but is caught up with his friends in political activism and ends up in prison for a crime that was poorly planned and went tragically awry. VERDICT A well-told story of the Basque region, whose violent past is familiar to many. Here, however, the reader is immersed in the landscape's color, language, and culture while reading an absorbing political mystery. [See Prepub Alert, 2/9/15.]—James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
★ 2015-05-12
A terrorist bombing in Madrid stirs up memories in a Basque town of a politician kidnapped and killed, an act that linked the political and the personal, in this thoughtful, ambitious debut. The American teacher Joni has been in the town of Muriga for more than 50 years when an al-Qaida cell's 2004 attack on Madrid's Atocha train station recalls a local episode of Basque separatist violence six years earlier, one of "these acts that erode the soul of a people." In chapters that alternate among the voices of Joni; Mariana, the victim's wife; and Iker, one of the kidnappers, Urza illuminates the before—from days to decades—and after of the abduction. Mariana remembers that while her husband pursued party politics in Bilbao half the week, she was having an affair with the young American teacher who came to Muriga to replace the elderly Joni at the local school. Iker speaks from his prison cell, recalling how he was drawn reluctantly from truancy and vandalism to violence even as he sought a way out of the town through English lessons with Joni. And the American teacher, whose early years in Muriga were scarred by deep love and loss that cemented him to the town, finds his friendship with Mariana collapsing in the wake of her husband's death. Urza's fragmented, cinematic structure can confuse with its disjointed chronology, yet it works well to let each member of the trio reveal a different segment of the town's populace and history. While Iker's crime grew from the pointless acts and energy of youth and Mariana's infidelity was enabled by party politics, Joni's long-ago lover could recall seeing her father shot by Franco's men at the former army barracks that came to serve as the high school where Joni taught students like Iker. The author's family is from Spain's Basque region, which helps explain why an American writer would venture into this fraught history, and Urza does so convincingly, revealing the human faces behind the masks of terrorism and its collateral damage.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169749311 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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