Interview

Lamar Herrin explains his motivation for writing House of the Deaf, about one man's quest to find answers to explain his daughter's murder at the hands of terrorists.

When I was director of Cornell University's Study Abroad program in Spain, I did my jogging around the Parque Santander. A number of my students did, too. Three or four years later, an American man running around that same park was killed when a car bomb, planted by the Basque nationalist organization ETA, went off before a Civil Guard headquarters. I couldn't help but ask myself: What if that American had been one of my students? How would I answer to the parents of such a student should they present themselves before me?

In spite of Basque pressures for independence, in spite of ETA, Spain remains a charming country, with a ceremonial sense of itself that brings the Old World up to date and takes history out of the museums and puts it squarely in the streets. Then a bomb goes off and all that history gets ripped apart.

Spain has its dark side (Goya painted his dark paintings in a house called "House of the Deaf Man"), and the darker Spain gets the more powerful its pull might be felt to become. As a novelist, I wanted to see what might happen to a revenge-minded American, whose daughter has been killed, and to a second...