Author: Kirmen Uribe
- Fiction
- Booket Planeta
- ISBN: 9788432221354
- Release Date: 01-01-2013
-Reviewed by: Sean Knowlton
In Lo que mueve el mundo (What makes the world move), Kirmen Uribe shines a light on some lesser-known aspects of the Spanish Civil War and World War II by recovering and celebrating the memory of one forgotten everyday hero, Robert Mussche, a Belgian who sacrificed himself for his friends and family during wartime.
Initially intrigued by the stories of Basque children sent abroad to live with sympathetic strangers during the Spanish Civil War, the author Kirmen Uribe instead found himself with unfettered access to the personal library and archive of a Belgian who, in 1937, opened his home to nine-year-old Karmentxu from Bilbao. As recounted by the author in his March 2013 article in the weekend magazine of El País, Carmen Mussche, named after little Karmentxu, thought it fitting to allow a Basque writer to recount her father’s story.
At Carmen’s request, Uribe has fashioned a work of literary nonfiction centered on Robert Mussche that frees his story from the weight of history and gives it life through narrative. The result is a novelized biography of Robert Mussche as interpreted from personal letters, photographs, literature from the protagonist’s personal library, interviews, and secondary works of history. Uribe blends these historical, non-fictional elements with dramatized scenes that establish Robert’s character, convictions, and his strong sense of obligation to his family and friends.
The protagonist, Robert Mussche, was a Flemish-speaking citizen of Gante, Belgium. During his life he was a war correspondent, a translator of García Lorca, a father, the best friend to leading Flemish-language author Johan Daisne, a saboteur, a member of the Belgian Resistance during the German occupation, and a political prisoner. This work includes these elements of his life, yet it chooses to emphasize his personal qualities and convictions over exploits.
The short chapters jump between historical exposition, dramatic dialogue, extracts and even entire letters from Robert’s wife, and interpretations of personal interviews. The author inserts himself into the novel by including his research process and experience into the text itself, thus blurring the lines between novel, research notes, and personal reflections. This approach to narrative is reminiscent of that utilized by Javier Cercas for his best-selling novel, Soldados de Salamina (translated as Soldiers of Salamis).
This novel explores universal themes - love, friendship, family and obligation - in the face of military occupation and war. Not only does it highlight unfamiliar aspects of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, but the author does so by utilizing an imaginative and refreshing narrative style. Nonetheless, I believe that much of the context of the novel – the plight of Basque children during the Spanish Civil War, the German occupation of Belgium during World War II and the ensuing resistance movement, as well as references to Belgium culture, make this novel not immediately accessible to a reader in the U.S., especially if approaching this work as a “Spanish” novel.
Kirmen Uribe (b. 1970, Ondarroa, Basque Country, Spain) is an award-winning writer who writes in Basque (the language of Basque Country, a region in northeastern Spain and southwestern France). His works have been translated into Catalan, English, Galician, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish (Castilian).
His first novel, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, won the 2009 National Novel Prize of Spain (Premio Nacional de Narrativa), as well as the Critics’ Prize for Narrative in Basque. In 2002, he won the Critics’ Prize for Poetry in Basque for Bitartean heldu eskutik, translated as Meanwhile Take My Hand, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
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