I first became aware of the Basque Country my senior year of
high school while studying various regions of Spain in Spanish class. However, because
we focused more on other areas, the small community of northern Spain did not
stick with me at the time. It was not until the fall I started here at Loyola,
when I began following Athletic Club Bilbao, the area’s most prominent and
successful soccer team, that I became enamored with the Basques. Athletic Club
is unique not only in the world of soccer, but sports in general, for employing
only Basque players. This means that while every other team has its pick of top
players from all around the world, Athletic has an extremely limited selection
from a population of around 3,000,000 people in Spain and France. I was intrigued
about this, about why it was of such importance that all the players be tied to
the region, so I began researching the Basque country. This quickly changed
from a casual curiosity to a near obsession. (I once stayed up until 4 in the
morning reading Wikipedia articles about Basque mythology.) I was excited when
we watched the movie on Frank Gehry in class because it focused so much on the
city of Bilbao. And naturally, when browsing around a second hand bookstore, I
was beyond thrilled to find a cheap copy of the book The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I was
particularly excited at this find because even online information on the Basque
Country, and especially it language Euskera, is difficult to come by.
Knowing this, my interest was once again piqued. Not many
writers would choose such a topic to write an entire book on, especially
considering many people are not even aware of the existence of the Basques. I
decided to look into other books Kurlansky has written and discovered that this
is not a singular example. One of his most well-known works is entitled Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed
the World; another is Salt: A World
History. Almost all of his books are topics that, while understood perhaps
superficially by people, are largely unexplored on any deeper level. In each
case, he sees a story that has since gone untold, and takes it upon himself to
bring it to the world. But with titles like Cod
and Salt, one has to question
exactly how thrilling these stories could possibly be. How can in depth studies
of such ordinary and common topics garner top spots on multiple bestseller
lists? By being not just the facts of the matter, but a detailed and often
compelling story that explores not only the topic at hand, but every aspect of history
and culture touched by these subjects. He does not want to focus one just one
aspect of the topic at hand, but rather, as he said in an interview, “I get an
idea, something I want to write about and then I have a very long conversation
with myself about it. I do have that central spine – the idea. But then I allow
myself to run out in a lot of directions.”
However, Kurlansky does not just write non-fiction. He has
several fiction works, as well, and even multiple children’s books. This is
perhaps one of the main reasons his non-fiction narratives never fall flat. When
asked in an interview if he approaches writing the two genres the same, he
replied, “Yeah. I find they have a lot in common. How you solve your problems
are quite different. In non-fiction you can always go back to the research,
whereas in fiction you have to go back to yourself -- which is a little bit
scary.” In another interview, along the same lines, he stated that, “I have
written a great deal of both and the process is similar. Both involve factual
research. But in fiction you have to dig within yourself and your experience
for things you find in archives for nonfiction. With fiction often you are the
archive.” Beyond the problem-solving matter, there seems to be little
difference. For him, cod and salt are not a fish and a rock, but living,
dynamic characters, as would be seen in any work of fiction. In The Basque History of the World, the
character is an entire nation of people whose history has rarely been shared. For
Kurlansky, there is more than just pure fact to every subject; there is always something
new to tell.
This is part of the reason he branched into writing books
for children and teens. He has said multiple times that he enjoys writing for a
younger audience because they are more open and receptive in ways that adults
are not. After writing Cod and Salt, he went back and wrote children’s
versions of each, along with The World
Without Fish: How Kids Can Help Save the Oceans. While telling the story of
the risks of overfishing, this book also instructs a young audience on how they
can protect fish in the future, with the hopes that once they become adults the
lesson will have stuck. But my favorite, probably unsurprisingly, is The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi.
Written in both English and Euskera, it tells the story of a
girl who swims from her home on the east coast to the Basque Country, only to
return home and find that no one believes the place is real. I found this
concept particularly poignant after an encounter I had with a friend while I
was reading
Basque History. Even
after asking me about the book and reading the back cover, he asked if it was a
true story, if these were real people.
This incident highlights just why his books are so unique. While
being primarily non-fiction, they are so rich and compelling, it is almost as
if such forgotten histories are unreal. The stories are so fantastic and yet so
realistic they seem to become a genre unto their own.
