"My brother Juan was murdered in Urabá. Despite the immense pain it caused me, I immediately realised that something had happened which had the dimensions of a tragedy – I mean the aesthetic dimensions. Part of me felt a pain which was at times unbearable, while the other part was coldly considering the facts, like someone looking at a fallen tree who assesses the size of the canoe he can extract from it. And that is what I did. I wrote In the Beginning Was the Sea, and it often occurred to me while doing so that I was shamelessly using the death of my brother to produce literature. But that’s how I carried on writing."  Tomás González, on writing In the Beginning Was the Sea