The difficulty of narrating how your world falls to ruins with the death of a son.
The author of 'Patria' novelizes a family tragedy to tell a collective and real drama, the death of 50 children in 1980 in a gas explosion in the school of a town in Vizcaya.
In the narrative heart of this novel everything is absence. An irreparable and resounding absence, that of Nuco, the child of the title, dead at the age of six. He was one of the 50 children who, in 1980, lost their lives in a propane gas explosion in the Marcelino Ugalde public school in the Vizcaya town of Ortuella. Fifty in a town of some 8,000 inhabitants is an immeasurable loss of the community's future and a devastating flood of family tragedies whose magnitude escapes the expressive possibilities of literature.
How does one tell the story, how does one write a novel about something like this? Aramburu must have pondered long and hard on this question that delves into the frontiers of the literary, and his answer is implicit and articulates “El niño:” he limits the focus to one of those tragedies by approaching it as a case and, at the same time, as an allegory of the collective annihilation.
