2023-05-05 04:00:18
“The Silent Years” reconstructs a true story: a shocking disappearance that took eighty years to resolve. alvaro arbina He was collaborating with Radio Euskadi’s “Boulevard” program when he came to that event in the small town of Gaztelu: “My task was to tell real, interesting and relatively unknown events. Over the course of three years, I spoke about more than a hundred stories. But with none of them did I feel the need to write as with this one. I immediately realized that 15 minutes on the air was not enough. As I studied more about him, I discovered that he had all the ingredients to tell it in a larger format. And also brought together in a story two of the narrative genres that he had already worked on: the event of a crime, and historical costumbrismo or the story of what life was like in the past”. It is a novel that “delves into envy, temptations, offenses, superstitions and Basque legends that inhabit an isolated community. It is also a novel that talks about the infinite love of a mother for her children. It is a sad story and also full of beauty”.
The main character is Josefa, “a pregnant woman who takes care of her six minor children, while her husband spends long periods of time in the mountains working coal. Josefa is a different woman against all odds. A sensitive and powerful elegance, in half of the rural world. Josefa struggled to be herself, in a community where being different could be a problem.” Around them “the characters of a village isolated by forests and mountains grow, where time passes without anything apparently happening. But in reality, everyone is scared. No one dares to break the silence that has settled in the houses after the disappearance. What has happened to this family? How can fear silence people? Are we capable of perceiving that something is wrong when everyone around us is doing it?”
It talks about “that primal beast that we all carry inside and that we keep at bay thanks to civility and culture. It talks about a community and its ‘flock’, and the frustration everyone feels when seeing how a sheep goes off track. Frustration and envy for not knowing how to get out of it too. It talks about the truth, that construct of the human being, that ideal so many times mistreated and disfigured. I would like to believe that one comes out of this novel differently from how they entered. I wanted to write something about the generation of grandparents, who are slowly leaving with their stories. Culture, whether through a book or a screen, is a vaccine against ignorance, stupidity and barbarism. Knowing now, understanding now, can save us from acting in the future as we did in the past. Stories like ‘The years of silence’, even if they are with a small grain of sand, have to serve for that”.
alvaro arbina
the years of silence
Harper Collins, 304 pages, 23 euros
#sad #beautiful #story