The work, published by Joan Mari Irigoien in the early 1980s, has had a great impact thanks to the renewed edition of 1995. However, here we will address the original, because it seems to us that the context of that writing (the beginning of the Transition and the short tradition of the Basque modern novel) and the bold literary proposal that it does deserve it.

This work narrates the collective memory of the Basques from Carlism to the beginning of the Transition. However, it is not a typical historical and chronological account, beyond pure realism, which drains from surrealism, magical realism, etc. It represents every historical era through a narrative technique, with gestures and a symbolic world filled with literary (especially Mexican literature) and religious texts.

The play is full of characters with a very different conception of the world. Initial simplicity and dualism are becoming complexity and richness. There are characters who dedicate themselves to Platonic epistemology, but there are also those who express the truth and the impossibility of perceiving reality. As for the political ideologies, the characters of carlism, liberal and carlist, are very marked. However, this duality has become an essential duality in the second. It begins to dissolve throughout the Republic, to the point where many political positions flourish and to appear anarchists or socialists. After the War of 1936, it focuses on the tensions between the lost and the compromised generation. The former have been educated without vasquism to avoid political inheritance, while the latter feel a burden of compromise. Their limits and burdens lead them to question life itself until it finally explodes.

In addition to the coral narration created by the characters, one of the keys to the novel is the conceptualization of time. Time can be eternal, discontinuous, cyclical, or chronological, and jumps from one to the other show what the initial poem suggests: time is not just what marks the clock.

In this line follows the cyclical structure of the novel, both because wars are told one after another, and because the entrance and the end are engulfed by the voices of the dead, with a poetic vengeance that changes the history of the Transition.

It is a robust novel, solid and full of references, with anthological passages that emerge the fissures of the conflicts of the Basques, but which repeats some techniques and which takes a long time to try to cover the polyhedral view of reality. Perhaps too ambitious a work, but significant in the history of the Basque novel, built on the new literary trends.