09/24/2008
Dave Boling¿s exposure to Basque culture came through all the cultural events convened in Boise (Idaho, United States) by the Basque community: the “San Inazio” festival, the “Jaialdi” every five years, the eating, the drinking, the dances… Now, he hopes that through “Guernica”, his first work of fiction, people around the United States will be able to read about this sort of things and that will spread and awareness of who the Basque people are.
In an exclusive interview for eitb24.com before “Guernica” was presented in Boise, the US writer recognizes that when he first met his wife, he had no idea what Basque was. “The awareness of the Basque culture is very limited in America,” he adds.
“I met her when I was going to college at the University at the University of Idaho. She was this very lovely young lady, and I started talking to her and I discovered she was Basque. At the time I had no idea what Basque was. (…) And then, of course, that brought me into the Basque culture and for thirty years, I have just loved Basque people and their culture and I have been interested in their heritage and that, of course, led me into the knowledge of the bombing of Gernika,” Boling recounts.
A sports writer by trade at the Tacoma News Tribune in Washington State, the US writer thought of the bombing of Gernika as a backdrop for historical fiction “because, in America, it is amazing how little is known about it”. “Actually, most Americans, if you say the name Gernika, they think about Picasso’s mural rather than the atrocity that spun the mural,” he says.
Boling recognizes that, though a work of fiction, there is an autobiographical part in the book. “My characters are fictional but some of them don’t know it. Miguel does not understand how much of me is in him, Miren does not understand how much of my wife is in her.” “Her cousins, members of the Oinkari Basque dancers, doing the dance of the wine glass - that is in the book.”
“In a way, it is a theme of the book, these people are so happy lively dancing on the lip of a wine glass really unaware of how fragile are the underpinnings of their entire life. Their whole world was about to shatter beneath them and they did not know, they were happy just dancing along every day”, Dave Boling says of the Oinkari Basque dancers and the dance of the wine glass.
About the recognition as a “Barnes & Nobles new writer”, Boling says it is a “wonderful honor”, but recounts he approached the process of writing the book differently. “I did not really thinking about publishing it. I wrote it as a project. I am going to see if I can write fiction, I am going to do a lot of research. (…) If anyone wants it, that is up to them. But I am going to enjoy the process and I am going to learn from it.”
Basques in Boise
Requested his opinion on the how Basque traditions and heritage is kept alive in Boise, Boling praises the work of the Basque community and stresses how successful the people of Basque heritage have been. “They have just worked so hard that many have become very successful businessmen here in Boise. And another of the reasons is because they are so well respected, when they give their word, people know it is as good as gold and that you are going to do business with these people and they are going to be honest with you. And that is value that is sometimes rare in American business”.
The US writer, who is visiting this week Bilbao, Madrid and Barcelona for the promotion of “Guernica”, confesses he is already thinking about his next project. “I have actually four or five ideas, that I have started researching. I am going to stay with historical fiction,” Boling says.
According to Boling, one those ideas is to follow the Ansotegui family in “Guernica” and see how they progress. The plot could save a character that was cut in “Guernica”- the US writer recounts - he would go come to Boise, he would have a son and getting into the sixties he could go back to Spain and the dramatic backdrop could be the development of the ETA and the political struggle.
However, he says he does not want to be the author that just writes Basques so he is going to save those characters, and come back in the future.
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