In the late '60s, eight-year-old Tsiki goes to live with his uncle in San Sebastián. Through his innocent eyes, we observe how the days unfold in the family and the neighborhood: His uncle, Vithente, a weak-willed man, divides his life between the factory and the bar, while the real head of the family is his aunt, Maripuy, a woman with a strong personality but adhering to the social and religious conventions of the time; his cousin, Mari Nievas, lives with her mind constantly on boys, while his difficult and reticent cousin, Hulen, influenced by the systematic catechism of the parish priest, joins the ETA, which is going through its early stages of life. The fate of all these people - common with so many other extras of History, squeezed between necessity and ignorance - will undergo, years later, a dramatic change.
Alternating the protagonist's memories with the author's notes, "Years of Slowness" also offer an excellent portrayal of how life is distilled to become a novel, how emotional memory transforms into collective memory, while the transparent writing reveals the murky background of guilt behind the recent history of the Basque Country.
