WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE

The Spanish Civil War as it played out in the Basque region, chronicled from multiple points of view.

Debut novelist Zabalbeascoa’s decision to tell his story through a plethora of individual narrators perfectly captures the messiness of a civil war whose participants ranged from outright fascists, right-wing Catholics, and other conservatives aligned with Franco’s Nationalist rebels to the collection of anarchists, socialists, communists, and traditional democrats fighting for the Spanish Republic. This decision, however, also means that readers will need considerable time to discern the unifying thread involving Isidro Elejalde, a Republican soldier, and Mariana, who under the pen name Erlea writes impassioned pleas to her fellow Basques to join the fight to preserve democracy. Their anti-fascist salvos are eloquent, but Zabalbeascoa provides other perspectives as well. Some Nationalists offer standard tropes about godless rojos and “divine intervention on our side,” but more humane voices include a Nationalist guard who watches his fellow soldiers abuse helpless prisoners and thinks, “This isn’t why I fought,” and a nun who smuggles out a note from Mariana pleading for help after her newborn child is taken away to be given to “a mother and a father who have not fallen.” Nationalist atrocities are amply documented, but a wife-beating Republican and Isidro’s anguished confession after he shoots two teenage boys—“I’ve become the very thing I left home to fight”—make it clear there was brutality on both sides. The war’s deadly psychological toll is incarnated in a woman known as Have You Seen, who wanders the devastated countryside asking after the son everyone knows was killed months ago. As the Republican remnants straggle toward the border, Zabalbeascoa enlists Have You Seen to suggest tentative recovery from the wounds of war in a touching penultimate scene. Even the bleak final chapter describing the refugees’ chilly reception in France offers a glimpse of hope for the future.

Slow to start, but builds to an emotionally compelling climax.