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Published on Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10.24

I met the woman at a reading event in the Basque

town of Bilbao in September 2008. She said that she had read my novel “Guernica,” and was surprised in the way it led her to take a more personal interest in the recent news reports of the Russians’ attack on civilians in Georgia.

“It caused me to think about the victims,” she said. “Usually I would just read the headline and move on. But your characters were so fresh in my mind, I almost felt like I knew something about those who had been killed.”

It was a great compliment and a sad commentary at the same time. She was absolutely correct; one of the protective devices in human nature is the capacity to keep from internalizing others’ grief. It allows us to live our days, but it’s what causes us to be so shocked when it happens to us in hotels in Mumbai, in skyscrapers in New York, in Georgia, Iraq, Gaza … etc., etc., and, sadly, etc.

One of my hopes when I started writing fiction was to put a face on the victims of attacks – whether they be in the guise of war or terrorism. So I went back to one of the first, back to when it was so new that Winston Churchill called it “an experimental horror.”

Having been married to a woman of Basque descent, I was familiar with the 1937 bombing of the defenseless village of Guernica by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War. And of course from those in-laws I learned of the Basques’ interesting culture and great pride in their history and heritage. After the September 2001 attacks in America, I was surprised that little effort was made to look back at the history of such atrocities. The bombing of Guernica seemed of absolute relevance, but clearly had fallen from contemporary consciousness.

As I started building my characters, the patriarch of one of the families was in some ways shaped by my wife’s grandfather, whose name “Justo” I appropriated for my fictional character. He was a strong man of high integrity; the embodiment of the kind of character we see too infrequently in modern literature. The more I studied the Basques, the influence of their lore and mythology became more evident, and I was inclined to imbue my characters with their traits. In Justo, I saw a character representative of “Aitor” (meaning: good father), the mythological Basque patriarch. The most powerful female myth is of “Mari,” and I named Justo’s wife “Mariangeles.”

If this approach gives the early sections the qualities of a fable, it is by design. I hoped that by enlarging them to carry a hint of myth, they would be representative of the Basque race itself. The trials of Justo and Mariangeles and their family, then, would be symbolic of the trials of the Basques as a whole.

These were happy and productive common people going about the business of living their simple lives when incomprehensible horror dropped from the skies. My novel could have ended at that point, telling the story of life and loss. An anti-war message would have been made, and that was a major theme, of course. But at that point in the story, I felt I owed the characters a chance to fictionally dig themselves out and go on living.

I wasn’t searching for some “Hollywood” ending. I wanted to take these strong characters and see how they might face their grief; how they might fight back, how they would find ways to keep living every day. And in their resilience, and through their various means of coping, I wanted them to discover at least a small degree of hope. For them and for us.

Because of my obvious connections to the Basques, this story was told from their perspective and was sympathetic to their situation. But my book’s dedication is to the victims of Guernica and all the “Guernicas” that followed. The theme is universal, and I hope the message translates as it applies on a daily basis, around the globe.

So when we read of 173 killed in Mumbai, for instance, I hope we can recognize that it’s not just 173 deaths, it’s a tragedy that spreads outward and exponentially to spouses, to families, to loved ones, to communities, to nations, to anyone who cares about peace and despises the senselessness.

When the reader in Bilbao that night told me that she now looked at these reports differently, and could recognize the human cost, it meant that the most important message of the book had been received.