BARCELONA — A novelist's "brutal" portrayal of the impact of Basque terrorism on ordinary people's lives has stepped in to fill the post-conflict vacuum in the northern Spanish region where there has been no peace process and precious little reconciliation.

The armed campaign of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or "Basque Country and Freedom") ended in 2011 after nearly four decades, but divisions between those who supported the separatist group and the families of its more than 800 victims remain an open wound, and the battle over how to remember the conflict is ongoing.

Fernando Aramburu's 600-page novel Patria ("Motherland"), which has sold 180,000 copies since it was published in September, has reminded Spain of the dormant power of literature to shake up society. Praised by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and by Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, it is also recommended by one of the associations of the victims of ETA violence, which would like to see it made compulsory reading in schools.

“The fight has now turned to the account of what happened,” Aramburu told POLITICO in an interview during a visit to Barcelona to promote the book, which is being translated into English, German, French, Italian and three other European languages, while the rights have been sold for a TV series. The 58-year-old author, who has lived in Germany since 1985, hopes his ninth novel can help confront the narrative of those who “glorify the aggressor … and attempt to make an angel out of him."

"Motherland" tells the story of two families in a Basque village. One household is shattered when the father, a businessman called Txato, is harassed and then assassinated by the separatists. His widow, Bittori, becomes obsessed with finding the murderer and making him ask for forgiveness. The second family's oldest son Joxe Mari joins ETA, kills in the name of independence and goes to prison. His mother, Miren, reacts by becoming a hardline ETA supporter. Miren and Bittori, the main protagonists, were close in their youth but the violence ruins their friendship.

“These two mothers represent somehow the division of Basque society, a relatively quiet society, enclosed within itself, proud of itself, which enters a spiral of violence, assassination and aggression,” said Aramburu, who has written about terrorist violence in previous works of fiction. “My novel is full of ordinary people … who are confronted with the issue of violence. Like it or not, they need to take sides. It affects them in a direct, tragic manner. And there’s no way out.”

Targeted by ETA

In "Motherland," Txato’s ordeal starts when ETA targets his business. He complies with the group's extortion at first, but when he stops paying, the village is plastered with threatening graffiti. His friends stop talking to him, neighbors sing menacing songs, the workers in his factory become aggressive and his family is marginalized. When, one rainy day, he's murdered, his widow and children are forced to leave the village.

It’s a pattern familiar to Consuelo Ordóñez, president of Covite, an association of relatives of terrorism victims in the Basque Country. Her brother Gregorio, a member of the Basque regional parliament for the conservative Popular Party, was murdered by ETA in San Sebastian in 1995. When she began taking part in public activities against the terrorist group, her name — circled by a bull's eye target — appeared on walls around San Sebastian. Her law practice suffered and friends became distant. One night, her home was hit by Molotov cocktails. Forced to live under armed guard, she eventually left the Basque Country in 2004.

For Ordóñez, Aramburu "masterfully" captures the suffering and loneliness of the victims of terrorism as well as the “oppressive atmosphere” created in the Basque Country by ETA's violence, their supporters and the “morally corrupt” majority who remained silent. She would like the text to become part of the curriculum in Spanish schools. “It’s absolutely brutal," she said. "This novel will be more effective than anything we could say or do in our organization.”

While "Motherland" has been praised by the vast majority of Basque and Spanish political forces, not everyone is wholehearted in their praise, especially among the abertzale, or "patriotic" left, which won 21 percent of votes in the last regional election and largely supported ETA's violence. Jon Iñarritu, an abertzale lawmaker in the Spanish senate, described parts of the book as clichéd and simplistic and said the “Spanish media establishment” was keen to promote what he described as “a true account but not the whole account.”

Pack of wolves

Iñarritu and other Basque nationalists — even the ruling, conservative Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which opposed ETA's violence — tend to see the decades of violence in terms of a conflict between two sides who both committed crimes and left victims.

From toward the end of dictator Francisco Franco's time in power until a decade after the transition to democracy, the Basque Country had its own “dirty war” when shadowy paramilitary and far-right groups, acting with the blessing or tolerance of the government in Madrid, killed dozens of people suspected of links with ETA — 73, according to one Basque government report. Other research has compiled 4,000 credible accounts of torture in police custody from 1960 to 2013, most of which went unpunished, resulting in repeated condemnations of Spain from advocacy groups and the European Court of Human Rights.

"Motherland" portrays torture in police custody — Joxe Mari is brutally beaten in detention — and the consequences of ETA prisoners being scattered around Spain, meaning it's not an easy target for criticism for Basque nationalists. Aramburu's focus, however, is the suffering of ETA's victims and the suffocating atmosphere in the Basque Country's most militant towns and villages.

Jokin Bildarratz, a senator for the PNV and former mayor of Tolosa — a Basque town of 19,000 which was hard hit by the violence — said he has seen with his own eyes much of the drama "Motherland" depicts and had known people who vividly resemble the characters in the book. It provides a balanced account of “the suffering that the existence of a terrorist group inflicted on the Basques’ daily life,” he said, while recommending that readers should compliment it with documentation of the state's "dirty war" to get the full picture.

While ETA has not heeded Madrid's demands to surrender its weapons, neither has the central government implemented conciliatory measures.

Some of that historic tension remains. While ETA has not heeded Madrid's demands to surrender its weapons, neither has the central government implemented conciliatory measures demanded by most Basque political forces, such as allowing approximately 400 people still jailed for ETA crimes to serve out their sentences in local jails rather than being dispersed across Spain.

Aramburu, who puts the suffering of the Basque country in a wider context where "the behavior of wolves ... is directly applicable to human society," said his adopted home in Germany is close to the site of the Nazis' Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Busloads of modern-day German schoolchildren are taken there to learn about the atrocities committed at the camp and to ensure they have "a fairly complete notion of the horrible history of the country and people they belong to," the author said. “I wish something like this for the Basque Country.”