Every novel starts somewhere physical, even the ones that pretend otherwise. The Grave He Digs starts in the salt pans — the shallow basins cut and coaxed into the shore rock of the Greek Mani, where seawater was let in, penned, and abandoned to the sun until it gave up its white harvest.
The Mani grows almost nothing. The soil is a rumor between stones. What the peninsula had to sell, it had to make from what was there: stone, and the sea. Salt was wages. Salt was the coast's one obedient crop, and families worked their pans the way inland families worked terraces — jealously, and with long memories about who scraped what from where.
That's what pulled me in. Salt preserves things: fish, hides, the dead. The Mani preserved everything — grudges above all. A culture that salts away its grievances, that keeps its dead present through sung laments and its enemies present through the notches of a long feud, is a culture where the past never has the decency to pass. That's not a metaphor you have to build as a novelist. It's sitting right there, glaring white at the edge of the water.
So the book begins there — with salt work, which is patient, and with what patience becomes in a country where every family keeps its ledger. The towers, the guns, and the oath all come later. The pans come first, because before a man in the Mani could afford a rifle, somebody had to carry the salt.
More research dispatches from the world of the book: The World of The Grave He Digs.