El comensal

Death is a first-order event. When the Grim Reaper takes a loved one, we inherit what was left unresolved, and the pain, or liberation, that death entails extends over time until the living assumes not only the disappearance of the other, but also part of the its own insofar as we are made up of pieces of the others. In this autobiographical novel, Gabriela Ybarra tries to understand her relationship with death and family through the analysis of two events: the murder of her grandfather in 1977 at the hands of ETA and the death of her mother in 2011 from cancer. Thus, the first part of El comensal is a free reconstruction (therefore, it does not hide the fictional part from all memory) of the kidnapping and subsequent murder of the Spanish businessman Javier de Ybarra, who was also mayor of Bilbao and president of the Diputación de Bilbao. Vizcaya during the Franco regime. Although this death has shaken the entire family clan (the protagonist's parents have to leave the Basque Country and live with an escort), it is not until the narrator's mother becomes fatally ill that the undone duels and the political legacies do not assumed (sometimes out of ignorance) explode.