'Uranda is an imaginary village that I have made up based on the villages I remember from my youth. In Uranda everything is possible. The stories that my parents always used to tell me about the places they loved, revive in Uranda. This is how the scenery of Uranda was born. You may want to try to find Uranda in the map of the Basque Country, but for me Uranda could be anywhere, because everywhere there are generals, men in grey, mountaincaves, villages, cities and capitals, a north and a south, and people that move from one place to the other in search of something better, something new, something different (...) The event that motivated me to tell this story was a visit I paid to an aunt of mine. She was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and I had no prior experience or knowledge of that illness, so that evening at her house made a lasting impression on me. She was sitting there with an ancient photoalbum surrounded by her nephews, nieces, son, daughters, brothers, grandchildren, all of us...Then, she started pointing at pictures and telling us stories from a long time ago, before the chapter of her life that she became a mother and an aunt and later a grandmother to all of us, to a time of her life when she was just a young girl. She seemed to become a young girl again in front of our very eyes. All of us looked at her in surprise. At that moment I thought: "Yes, this happens to all of us. The people who know you in one time of your life as a mother, or a grandmother, have no idea of how you were before or how you felt before you became that person for them. I was thinking about that idea for a while and it was this idea that brought me to writing the book from different perspectives. In this way the reader sees how Javier behaves and how he feels, but his grandchild Evamar will never be able to know these aspects of him. She will always know him as Grandpa Javier." |