Bernardo Atxaga - Everything's connected, but we don't know how, these days nothing can be said to be peculiar to one place or person

Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak: Stories from a Village, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa Graywolf Press, 2010.

"Obabakoak is a quixotic, gem-like, shimmering, mercurial collection about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic Basque village. A schoolboy’s miningengineer father tricks him into growing up, an unfortunate environmentalist rescues deceptively harmless lizards, and a rescue mission on a Swiss mountain-climbing expedition in Nepal turns into murder. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, while everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page. Hints of darker undercurrents mingle with moments of wry humor in this dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts, and literary theory, all held together by Bernardo Atxaga’s distinctive and tenderly ironic voice. An unforgettable work from an international literary giant, whom The Observer (London) listed among the top twenty-one writers of the twenty-first century."

"A brilliantly inventive writer... he understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildy funny."—A. S. Byatt

"A book that foregrounds the importance of literature and language Barnardo Atxaga's Obabakoak is an achievement. Its methods are varied and much is bound by its spine--wit fiction autobiography metafiction explication literary and aesthetic theory instructions for writers (with chapters titled "How to Plagiarize" and "How to Write a Story in Five Minutes") and letters penned by characters of all walks of life. This inventory does not begin to account for Obabakoak's many delights. Readers find character reappearances linguistic repetitions and alternate endings. With so much to them these pages sate.
Obabakoak is largely responsible for Bernardo Atxaga's international renown. The book has a circulation history that testifies to its importance. It was originally published in Basque by Editorial Erein in 1988. In 1989 a Spanish version was released and Obabakoak was awarded the National Literature Prize. Three years later Hutchinson released the English translation in Great Britain. To date the book has been translated into more than twenty languages.
An international audience is fitting given the book's international scope. While the book's title which roughly translates to "the things and people of the village of Obaba" indicates a local focus the work is not fixed to a single location. "These days nothing can be said to be peculiar to one place or person" Bernardo Atxaga writes in his final chapter closing a book of many places--not only the Basque village of Obaba but also Hamburg Peru Castile Baghdad and elsewhere.
Readers are in the hands of an erudite author one who is thoughtful about the literary traditions he joins. The last chapter explicitly discusses the tradition of Basque writers and what it means to write with a "lack of an antecedent." Preceding this passage Atxaga takes his readers on a literary excursion that stops by the narratives of Waugh Chekhov Garcia Lorca and Maupassant. And Atxaga discusses his poetics explicitly: "I would say that the first duty of literary language is to be unobtrusive" he writes. Here Atxaga names his modus operandi: he skillfully sidesteps the heavy-handed or bold. Still he is able to speak politically and philosophically. The question of how words signify is consistently raised. What are words capable of the author asks. The author subtly teaches his readers to question each object presented--what could it symbolize? What interpretations are available? With this approach Atxaga makes literary theory accessible to a wide audience and what's more he makes it entertaining.
Atxaga has accomplished a work of metafiction that considers writing not only theoretically but also materially and from a process perspective. The author is noticeably interested in the material reality of writing--pen and paper and desk--from the first lines of the book. The chapter titled "An Exposition of Canon Lizardi's Letter" details the physical letter--its contact with the floor the type of paper used and so on.
The process of writing is likewise highlighted. A commonality among the characters in this book is their engagement with the literate act. On the fifth page Atxaga writes ostensibly of his character "He never got off to a good start. The words refused to give faithful expression to what was demanded of them." Reading such a statement one considers the labor that produced Obabakoak's opening lines.
In many ways this is a writer's book with all the (ir)reverence the word-craft invites. Atxaga's capacity to deliver the bon mot is on display. His humor draws the reader in as if into a close circle of peers. Such is the case in the lines "To write a story in just five minutes you need--as well as the customary pen and blank paper of course--a small hourglass which will provide accurate information both on the passing of time and on the vanity and worthlessness of the things of this life and therefore of the actual effort you are at the moment engaged in."
The collection is more than worth its effort. Atxaga offers a work that warrants study and analysis as it is born of such pursuits. He brilliantly merges narrative and discussion of narrative. He enfolds stories within stories writing within writing. With Obabakoak Atxaga names the world aptly as he problematizes that act. The collection deserves preservation like the language of its original publication. It will likely shape thought and literature for years to come." - ForeWord

"Strangest novel I’ve ever read? Obabakoak, composed in Euskara (Basque) by Bernardo Axtaga, who, the jacket copy tells us, had to translate his own book into Spanish so that it might find a broad European readership. (It worked.)
Before we reach even the prologue, the book tells us about The Game of the Goose (el juego de la oca), which is played:
'on a circular board of sixty-three squares, the sixty-third being occupied by Mother Goose. The first person to reach square sixty-three wins. Geese can also appear on the other squares and if you land on one of these, you jump forward to the next goose and get another throw of the dice. If you land on less fortunate squares such as the maze, the prison or the square symbolising death (a skull or skeleton) you must either wait for another player to take your place, go back several squares or return to square one. '
The Game of the Goose is an apt stand-in for the structure of Obabakoak, which contains not only stories set in the village of Obaba, but also in Baghdad, Amazonia, Hamburg, Castile, and China. I don’t want to give too much away, but The Game of the Goose reappears in the very short concluding chapter “By Way of an Autobiography” in which the book’s themes converge in an essay that conflates the life of the writer, the history of the Basque nation, the context of Basque literature, the prison, the skull, and a “sinister man dressed in green and wearing a top hat.”
Here is an excerpt from the chapter titled “Young and Green”:
‘Never go to sleep on the grass,’ our parents would tell us. ‘If you do, a lizard will come along and crawl inside your head.’
‘But how would it get in?’ we’d ask.
‘Through your ear.’
‘But what for?’ we’d ask again.
‘To gobble up your brains. There’s nothing a lizard likes more than human brains to eat.’" - Kyle Minor

"Graywolf brings back into print in a preferred translation (by Margaret Jull Costa) a classic of Basque fiction, Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak. Nobly withstanding inevitable comparisons to the work of Latin American Magical Realists, Obabakoak chronicles an antique yet timeless village landscape, where a runaway orphan can be transmogrified into a white boar, and a small lizard, inserted into a child's ear, can warp a life. But the book exudes its own charmingly Old World ambiance distinct from the raw youthful frontier stylings of GarciaMÃrquez and others from that hemisphere. The section titled "In Search of the Last Word" is a Calvinoesque collage of intertwining stories rich with references to the great literatures of the world. Atxaga is heir to Kafka and E. T. A. Hoffmann, proudly embracing his European blood." - Paul Di Filippo

"One of the central images of this delightfully dense Basque novel is of a dancer whose increasingly passionate circling around a full glass of wine on the floor leaves it, amazingly, intact. It's an apt image, not only for the ruminations on time, place, fate, and storytelling indulged in by both the unnamed narrator and his characters, but also for author Bernardo Atxaga's approach in this book. There's much traditional storytelling here, from fables to essayistic vignettes to realistic tales linked one to the next. But on the whole the book reads less like a novel than a virtuoso performance from a writer whose search for the truths of human experience takes readers from the Basque Country to Hamburg, China, the Himalayas, America, Montevideo, and ancient Baghdad, as well as from the 9th century to the present, in calendar date as well as in literary style - all without losing focus on the small, isolated Basque town evoked in the title, Obaba.
A sampling of titles for the more than two dozen chapter-like readings (to call them chapters would violate Atxaga's twin standards of inventiveness and precision of language) might give an indication of the scope of his vision and technique. Arranged in three sections called "Childhoods," "Nine Words in Honor of the Village of Villamediana," and "In Search of the Last Word," and leaving out the titles that are proper names of characters (which range from Germanic to Arabic), you'll read "The Game of the Goose," "An exposition of Canon Lizardi's letter," "Post tenebras spero lucem," "Young and green," "The rich merchant's servant," "Regarding stories," "In the morning," "How to write a story in five minutes," "The crevasse," "A Rhine wine," "X and Y," "The torch," and "By way of an autobiography." It's a lively pace, with plenty of tempo changes: you have to watch your step.
In fact, you might get lost, though the author's close focus never blurs. Characters appear, vanish, and reappear; narrative promises are delayed but kept. Words and images echo, subliminally -- blue and white, the favorite colors of a contemporary German character, seem like an incidental mention until they reappear two segments later as the colors of the flag of Lorraine, one of the armies fighting the invading Normans. The effect is of a kind of reassuring puzzlement: everything's connected, but we don't know precisely how. Mountain climbing plays a role; so do scary children's stories, Marco Polo, trains loaded with horses to sell for meat, and discussions of the concept of intertextuality. "As someone once said: 'Let nothing that has been lived be lost.'" Atxaga can give the impression of having left little lived by anyone before 1989 (the date of the novel's initial publication) unconsidered, if not unmentioned in these 288 pages. It can be a somewhat exhausting trip if you're looking to sit back and enjoy one, because your guide never lets up, on you or on himself. "I felt tired and disillusioned, old before my time, and when I sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper, I would weep."
Yet his earnestness keeps us from doing so. Atxaga's is not really a modern sensibility, and he's refreshing to read in that way: he's taking the world for what it is, and he's taking it seriously, even when he's telling jokes. Even when he's telling stories of psychosis and murder, revenge, small-town gossip, and "how to plagiarize" - which from an academic writer's perspective, at least, must seem like the height of cynicism - our maestro never strikes a truly cynical note. Tonally, the world of Obabakoak is somewhere between the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Peanuts, though the writers Atxaga evokes with reverence and wonder range from Maupassant to Melville to Kafka. "What exactly [is] originality...what should the function of art be?" At a relaxed pace, and in probing depth, narrator and characters discuss such questions straight out.
Not only are they discussed: in this translation by Margaret Jull Costa (of the translation into Spanish that Atxaga did himself from his native Euskal) they are demonstrated. Euskal may be unrelated to any other language on earth, but what Obabakoak shows is the intertextuality of the whole world, as experienced through "books [that] covered almost every inch of [the opening character's] room's four walls" as well as acute observation of the world itself: its medieval armies, its Muslim profession of faith, its lonely schoolteachers' love lives confounded by mail-delivery problems, its mountain climbers' habits with ropes, its Amazonian flora and fauna, its specific command of languages and cultures across continents. Perhaps it's not for nothing that the tales revolve around dances, mysteries, paradoxes, and games like The Game of the Goose, which starts and ends the book and who's board itself is "the reason...for us to keep playing." - Steve Street

"The subtitle of this collection, Stories from a Village, is slightly misleading, for while some are set in the fictional Basque village of Obaba many of them are not. It doesn’t take away from the stories in themselves and maybe this is part of Atxaga’s strategy for subverting reader expectations, something he does quite a lot—and very well too.
The index page is another example. It would suggest that these stories have been carefully sequenced and should be read in the order that the author intended, but while some do follow on from previous ones most stand on their own.
The stories vary in length from the novella “Words in Honor of the Village of Villamediana” to the three-page “How to Write a Story in Five Minutes.” This latter piece is a superb example of Atxaga’s craft, where in the space of a few hundred words, he layers two stories, that of a writer struggling to write a story and the story that he writes. The story within the story contains all the elements of a novel—characters, plot, denouement, and a twist at the end—in the space of a few tightly written paragraphs.
In other stories Atxaga is less concerned with the beginning, middle, and end than with the process of telling the story itself. Quite often the reader is left hanging, forced to mull over what he has just read and make his own conclusions about what the outcome might be.
In “The Rich Man’s Servant” he takes on a familiar folk tale and tells it in the traditional way and then a few pages later takes exactly the same story as his starting point but gives it his own twist.
There are knowingly contrived fables in which reality warps. A shepherd talking on a mountain walks off and seems to sprout wings and fly away. They can be taken as allegories, but more probably are meant to be taken literally.
Atxaga’s authorial voice almost conspires to make him a character in this collection, emerging from the diverse tales and modern-day parables that he tells as a slightly whimsical observer, probably from the village of Obaba, who has travelled much and is recounting the stories that he heard.
The collection is a translation of a translation. It was originally written in Basque, translated into Spanish by the author, and it is from the Spanish version that the English translation has been rendered. In his novel The Lone Man, Atxaga pondered on Basque identity in the modern-day Spain of autonomous regions, but he spends little time on ethnic or national issues in Obabakoak. This quirky, highly-original collection reaches will beyond any narrow geographic definitions." - Tony Bailie

"Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga is one of my favorite books. Certainly I have a little bias because it is by a Basque author, but it is simply a marvelous book, regardless of any personally leanings. I read it for the second time this summer as part of the New Mexico Euskal Etxea’s book club and rediscovered all of the charm and wonder that I first encountered over a decade ago when I first read it.
Using the fictitious Basque town of Obaba as a framing device, Atxaga tells a series of tales that are essentially independent short stories, but all with some connection to Obaba. Some take place in Obaba itself, others focus on people originally from Obaba. The town of Obaba serves to bring some cohesiveness to the collection.
I had forgotten some of the stories that really are great. Whether dealing with one man’s exploration of an old forgotten Spanish town, or the dreams of a man trying to escape his life through an elaborate crime, or even just the story of a man revisiting the mysterious circumstances surrounding the disability of an old grade-school friend, each story has a different style and different approach that individually explore the human condition in such a wonderful way, but collectively demonstrate the great skills of their author.
While the English version is a result of both Atxaga’s skill as a writer in Euskara as well as the translator’s ability to reword that Euskara into English, such that the line between author and text is a little blurred, the way words are used is just delightful. Take, for instance, this description from the chapter entitled “Nine Words in Honour of the Village of Villamediana”:
'Imagine, for example, that you have a cockroach living in your house and one day it occurs to you to christen that cockroach Jose Maria, and then it’s Jose Maria this or Jose Maria that, and very soon the creature becomes a sort of small, black person, who may turn out to be timid or irritable or even a little conceited. And obviously in that situation you wouldn’t dream of putting poison down around the house. Well, you might consider it as an option but no more often than you would for any other friend.'
That last line just completely changes the entire feeling of the paragraph. Or this one, from the same chapter:
'What else was solitude if not a situation in which even the ticking of a clock can be companionable?'
Overall, the stories, it seems to me, belong to that class of fiction that Borges contributed so much to, magic realism. These stories surprise the reader with their plot, but also explore those corners of the human experience, both the dark and light corners, that make life so rich, that make being human so, well, human. His characters all have their shortcomings, all have their foibles, and are the richer for it. There are no happy endings. There are endings that are happy, but just because that happens in real life at times. Just like real life, there are sad endings, and tragic endings, and Atxaga has all of those.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is simply interested in a collection of great stories." - Buber's Basque Page

"PLAGIARISTS need a method. It is best to pinch a clear plot-line - a Saki, not a Faulkner. Avoid the work of dissidents who may suddenly rise to fame and be read carefully. Stick to the classics, which people only pretend to have read, and if caught out, call it homage.
So runs the pragmatism of 'How to Plagiarise', one of the teasing stories Bernard Atxaga has set in the Basque village of Obaba in his odd-ball and winning book. Obaba is peopled with rascals, innocents, intellectuals, shepherds, hunters, village idiots (lots of these) and creatures of superstition. The mix is rather like an Isaac Bashevis Singer collection - of the middle European variety - only here one is more apt to be mischievously plucked back from a state of fairy-tale timelessness for a quick update analysis of the symbolism so far. Atxaga loves parody, riddles, manipulating texts within texts, which could of course all turn pretentious and hard-going if it weren't handled with charm and dexterity.
Just to clear up what the book is not: it is not a novel, despite what the jacket says. The stories fall into three sections and those in the third, 'In Search of the Last Word', are ingeniously linked into a narrative quest for a definition of what a story is. At a pinch you could call this section a novella, but the book is primarily and categorically a multi- faceted and rousing celebration of the short story.
Under any label, the tales roll on, Atxaga as convincing in the voice of an 11-year-old girl whose horse has gone to the knacker as in that of a windy old canon who won't admit he's had an illegitimate child. There is an ongoing mystery about whether a lizard can slip in through your ear to eat your brain and a personal favourite, 'How to Write a Story in Five Minutes', is complete with procrastination techniques.
In a prologue, Atxaga says that for four centuries only 100 books originated in the Basque language. Since the megalithic age this language has been 'hiding away like a hedgehog', fortifying itself largely on an oral tradition. Atxaga has not only awakened the hedgehog, but has brought it into the context of his own wide and idiosyncratic reading of world literature. This deft English translation derives from Atxaga's own translation from Basque into Spanish, which won Obabakoak Spain's National Literature Prize." - Maggie Traugott

"Written by Bernardo Atxaga, a contemporary author who writes in euskera, the language of the Basque country, Obabakoak is alternately called a novel and a short story collection. Too loose to fit the definition of a novel for most people, it still has some repeating characters, and the ending of the book depends on the reader's careful notice of details among the stories at the beginning. The integration of the beginning and the end make this a more connected group of offbeat stories than one usually sees.
Set in Obaba in the Basque country, the book allows myth and magic to overlap with theological questions in a story about a poor, ignored, and lonely boy who may or may not have turned into a white boar, which attacks and kills the cruelest people in the village and terrifies the priest. Animism adds pleasure to the life of an eleven-year-old girl living in the most remote corner of the village, as she walks with her grandfather, saying hello to the bat Gordon, her dog Toby, her horse Kent, and Frankie the chicken. In other stories, a nine-year-old boy meets a man who cannot stop talking and cannot function because his memories are so vivid, and then later meets an old friend in a psychiatric hospital who has had electroshock treatment and now has no memories at all. A young boy is seduced by the village teacher, frustrated because she has not heard from her lover at home, wantonly destroying the boy's life.
Angels appear and disappear, dreams and nightmares become real, and characters becomes incarnations of the devil. While religion seems to inform the lives of the characters, religion here is a cultural characteristic built from the stories the characters have shared from their own lives, and not a religion based on external doctrine. The deaths, and even murders, which are at the root of many of these stories are often attributed more to fate or superstition than to any sense of religious destiny, and as the stories of these deaths are repeated a village heritage and history are formed.
The second half of the book, "In Search of the Last Word," consists of many very short stories, most of them traditional plots common to other parts of the world, and as Atxaga develops these stories, the characters also talk about writing and what stories tell about the culture and the characters who tell and retell them. One section, entitled "How to Write a Story in Five Minutes," a playful and teasing examination of the creative process, is hilarious, while another, "How to Plagiarize," gets into the ironies and humor of developing themes that have existed for generations. The conclusion will leave the reader with a huge smile of recognition as old characters come back for an encore, not necessarily pleasant.
Ultimately, "Life," however, "is a journey full of difficulties in which Chance and Free Will intervene in equal measure, a journey, in which, despite those difficulties...it is possible to advance and safely reach that final pond where the Great Mother Goose awaits us." Stories within stories within stories take the reader on dozens of journeys to discover new places, new and strange characters, and old themes seen in new incarnations. And the book is really fun!" - Mary Whipple

Bernardo Atxaga, The Accordionist's Son: A Novel (Lannan Translation), Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, Graywolf Press, 2009.


"David Imaz, the protagonist in The Accordionist’s Son, was raised in the village of Obaba and is now living in exile on a ranch in California. Nearing fifty and in failing health, he decides to write the story of his youth, a narrative that takes the reader from 1936 to 1999. David’s pastoral childhood in Obaba is ruptured when, as a teenager forced to learn the accordion (like his father), he finds a letter implicating his father in fascist activities during the Spanish Civil War, including the execution of local republican sympathizers. This letter leads to other discoveries—like the fact that David’s uncle opposed his father’s activities—and Obaba’s history slowly cracks open to reveal to David the political tensions still raw beneath the surface, and the long shadow cast by the war. With The Accordionist’s Son, Atxaga delivers a politically charged and deeply personal novel —It is his finest work to date."

"Axtaga returns to Obaba, the fictional village at the heart of his acclaimed novel Obabakoak, to tell a gorgeous and ambitious story about the Basque land and language. Much of the book is set in the 1960s, when David Imaz, the teenage son of an accordionist, begins to suspect his father participated in the execution of villagers accused of being Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Twenty-five years after the war officially ended, political—even inadvertently political—choices remain deadly, but fear of Franco's civil guard neither darkens the innocence or exuberance of the young nor lightens the guilt of their parents. In Obaba, grudges and friendships are long-lasting and deep, and secrets are buried only shallowly. The narrative moves back and forth through time, from the 1990s, when gravely ill David reflects on his life from a ranch in California, to the war in the 1930s and through David's sometimes dangerous coming-of-age up through the 1970s. Originally written in Basque (and later translated into Spanish), the novel is a worthy addition to both Axtaga's body of work and the Basque canon." - Publishers Weekly

"Basque author Atxaga’s latest novel probes into the life story of David Imaz, a Basque musician who left Spain to join his uncle Juan on a California horse ranch. The novel opens just after David’s death at age 50, when Joseba, his dear friend from the small Basque village of Obaba, is about to return there after spending a month with David and his wife, Mary Ann, before he died. On his departure, Mary Ann entrusts Joseba with the book David wrote in their native tongue to keep his homeland alive. The scene shifts to the family’s postwar years, where David’s father, an accordionist, also had political responsibilities. As he matures, David hears stories about Obaba during the Spanish civil war and suspects his father was involved in atrocities committed at the time. He becomes estranged from his father, while at the same time embracing his uncle, an underground activist against the military dictatorship, who eventually exiles himself to the U.S. Atxaga’s is an elegiac tale of the rippling effects of that war, and all wars." - Deborah Donovan
“The Accordionist’s Son at first beguiles us with its leisurely flow like a late summer river, but it is a dark river with streaks of blood seeping from the muddy banks of the past. The undercurrents of class divisions, very personal politics and the sins of the fathers pull us deeper. It is a disturbing story about good and evil embedded in the struggle to save a language and culture, a struggle that metamorphoses into terrorism.” —Annie Proulx

“Each character is a world, a story marvelously integrated into the whole… A master storyteller has become a fabulous chronicler of reality. . . The Accordionist’s Son charms and moves us.” —LA VANGUARDIA

One of the “21 top writers for the 21st century.” —The Observer

"In September, 1957, Joseba, the speaker who opens the novel, and his friend David Imaz are both eight years old when they introduce themselves to the new teacher at their Basque school in Obaba, near Guernica, Spain. David, sometimes called “the accordionist’s son,” is, like his father, an accordionist--an “artist” at his craft--and almost instantly, he finds himself perched on top of a desk, playing for his delighted class. Forty-two years later, the accordion is put away, and Joseba is visiting David’s widow, not in Basque country, but at Stoneham Ranch in Three Rivers, California, where David’s uncle once lived, and where David has been raising thoroughbred horses for more than twenty-five years. Joseba has been visiting there for a month, overseeing David’s epitaph, which is written in three languages--Basque, Spanish, and English—and coming to know his American wife Mary Ann, his two young daughters, Liz and Sara, and the completely different life that David chose for himself after he left Obaba when he was in his mid-twenties.
Mary Ann has a mission for Joseba. She wants him to take one of the three copies of a book that David has written in Basque back to the library in Obaba. It is David’s life story, including his involvement in the history of his Basque village, and it reveals important discoveries he made about other people in the village, including some of his own family, who sided with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 39) and may have murdered some of their fellow citizens. It also contains other information about David’s life “before California,” a life that he has not shared with his wife and daughters but believes they have a right to know upon his death.
Joseba, a published author who also participated in the events in Obaba with David, discovers when he reads David’s book that “events and facts have all been crammed” into the book, “like anchovies in a glass jar.” He suggests to Mary Ann that he rewrite the book, expanding David’s memoir and setting the record straight, promising that “any lines I add…must be true to the original.” Mary Ann agrees, and three years later Joseba has completed the book which becomes the text of this novel.
As David’s story unfolds, the divisions within the town of Obaba and within the Imaz family are clear. Uncle Juan, his father’s brother, is close to David, and Juan does not hide the fact that he loathes Capt. Degrela, who recruited for the fascists during the war. Degrela now owns the local hotel, where he hangs out with David’s father Angel and the hotel manager, known locally as “Berlino” for his past sympathies. Nine local people, thought to have been sympathetic to the revolution and against the military dictatorship, were murdered at the outset of the war, and David believes that Capt. Degrela, “Berlino,” and his own father were involved in these atrocities. For reasons David does not initially understand, his beloved Uncle Juan does not live in town, where David’s family lives, preferring the country life at Iruain, outside Obaba, where he raises horses when he is not working in California. David, too, prefers the country life, and his firmest friendships occur during school vacations when he can spend time with the local boys from the country, not the better educated children who are schooled in town. It is through his travels back and forth between town and country, and through his relationships with both groups, however, that he eventually learns the true history of the town in the years before he was born. As he is investigating this history, however, he is also dealing with traditional (and, in his case, not-so-traditional) parent-child problems and the urgencies of adolescence.
By June, 1970, David, aged 22, has finished his fourth year of university, and the political situation in his Basque homeland, relatively peaceful for years, has seriously deteriorated. Gen. Franco and the military dictatorship fear that the Basque region is fomenting communist-style revolution, and they are watching activities there carefully. The bombing of a recently erected marble monument, created to honor the fascists who fought with Franco during the Civil War, combined with the burning of the Spanish flag and the raising of the Basque flag over the town hall brings the military to Obaba, at the same time that reform-minded college students from outside Obaba also arrive, setting up a final confrontation and bringing the novel full-circle.
Though the novel sounds like a “historical novel,” the Basque setting and the events of the Spanish Civil War, which drive the plot, seem less important to the author and the reader than the characters and the crises they face. Atxaga is intent upon creating a vibrant picture of life in a rural Basque community, and as he recreates the culture, introduces the kinds of people who live within it, and includes homey details in his descriptions, the reader sees how much like the rest of us these people are, despite their obvious cultural differences. In their childhood, David and Joseba and their friends act like typical young boys, enjoying the same kinds of activities that children enjoy around the world, and when, as teenagers and youths in their early twenties, they become caught up in events, the results of which they cannot possibly foresee, the reader understands that they are innocent of malice, just naïve youths caught in a whirlwind that has taken their lives out of control.
Despite the lengthy cast of characters, the characters are realistic and honestly depicted, and most of them come alive for the reader. When sudden “accidents” or murders occur, the reader mourns the losses of these characters, even while wondering how such “normal” young people can possibly be so misunderstood. Many of the events, even the horrific ones, also involve moments of dark, ironic humor, and the author sprinkles these moments throughout the novel to offer relief from the violence and the seriousness of the main issues. Raquel Welch riding a horse in a bikini, children playing with the skull of a dead horse, and a donkey crashing a party to distribute pamphlets listing the prettiest girls in Obaba, all add to the atmosphere and the sense of “rightness” of Atxaga’s story. Written by one of the few novelists still writing in the Basque language, The Accordionist’s Son is a novel of epic scope and broad social impact, a novel which grows for the reader because the author chooses to be honest about his characters, instead of molding them to the needs of his plot. One of my favorite novels of the year." - Mary Whipple

Excerpt

Bernardo Atxaga, The Lone Man (Panther), Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, Panther Press, 1998.

"Carlos, the protagonist of Bernardo Atxaga's novel The Lone Man, thought he had left behind his old life as an activist in ETA, the Basque Independence Movement, when he went straight and bought a hotel in Barcelona. Then, as one last favor to the movement, he agrees to harbor two terrorists on the lam. This gesture plunges him back into a familiar yet perilous world of playing cat-and-mouse with terrorists and police. Set during the 1982 World Cup championship, The Lone Man follows Carlos's attempts to smuggle his charges out of the country as it simultaneously delves into his memories of past actions. Part crime story, part psychological thriller, The Lone Man maps out a landscape of fear and the paralyzing effects of unresolved guilt. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title." - Amazon.com Review

"The passions that fire the Basque independence movement are smothered beneath a thick blanket of political ideology in this 1994 tale of one man's efforts to come to terms with his revolutionary past through a final act of heroism. It is 1982, and while most of Spain's attention is focused on the World Cup soccer tournament being played in Barcelona Carlos, a Basque separatist turned hotelier, is hiding two members of the movement in his nearby establishment. The situation is complicated by the presence of a suspicious police force assigned to protect the Polish soccer team staying at the hotel, and by Carlos's ambivalence about his risky actions. Is his complicity a noble demonstration of his unquenchable revolutionary fervor, or a foolhardy gamble to alleviate the ennui he feels in his suddenly normal life? Atxaga (Obabakoak) strives to write the sort of personalized political thriller mastered by Graham Greene and Robert Stone, but he fails to create characters whose personal struggles give the issues at hand a human dimension. Carlos's mind is a sounding board for the incessant voices of his institutionalized brother, Kropotky, his guerrilla mentor, Sabino, and a cynical conscience he dubs "the Rat." But he is so estranged from his own emotions that he remains a cipher. Novels of such intense political conviction are rare, yet this one reads more like a textbook analysis of a revolution than a heartfelt account of one who fought in it." - Publishers Weekly
Bernardo Atxaga, The Lone Woman, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Press, 1999.

"Basque writer Atxaga, whose 1994 novel, The Lone Man, described a former terrorist's inability to escape his past, offers a compact, introspective tale of a political separatist who emerges from prison to embark on a new life. Irene, 37 and newly freed after four years in a Barcelona jail, has renounced her terrorist affiliations. The novel takes the form of her homecoming, with a few flashbacks and "dreams," via a bus journey home to Bilbao. Disoriented and friendless, Irene needs help shaking her prison blues. But the men in her life, with the exception of a memory (her long-dead lover, a shy, "delicate" fellow subversive) range from worthless to malevolent. The man she slept with on her first night out of prison abused her; her father seems ambivalent about her release; she writes off a selfish, lukewarm lover, a member of her former organization; even the male bus drivers are rude. Worst of all are two policemen, who are, as she feared, stalking her on the bus. One of them bullies and physically threatens her. The other, handsome and smooth talking, insidiously offers friendship, preying on her loneliness and sexual insecurity. Yet memories of prison, specifically of her cellmate, wise sexagenarian Margarita, encourage and inspire her, and cigarettes and books bolster her confidence. Several women passengers on the bus also come to her aid, among them a nun who bravely defends Irene. With its juxtaposition of threatening male and supportive female characters, the tale seems almost a feminist allegory in which the political has become intensely personal. One of the nuns assures Irene, "we're not totally responsible for many of the things that we do," thus inviting deeper questions of will and identity in this fascinating portrait of a woman asserting herself in an often oppressive and hostile world." - Publishers Weekly

"This is a short yet powerful novel that concerns an ex-terrorist, Irene. Beginning at the entrance of a train station in Barcelona and ending at the bus stop of her final destination, Irene passes from incarceration to freedom. On her first night out of prison, she picks up a man, but the encounter turns disastrous. Deciding to return home to Bilbao, she is haunted by the previous night. But she must think about her future. Should she return to her lover, a fellow terrorist? Does she try to rejoin the organization? How will she support herself? At the age of 37, without friends or close family, Irene must start a new life. To make matters worse, two policemen follow her to persuade and coerce her into becoming an informant against terrorist groups. Wanting to help and protect her, two nuns become her allies, but ultimately Irene is on her own. Struggling to think and feel like a free person, Irene fears that she will never escape her prison-self." - Michelle Kaske

Bernardo Atxaga's Literary Universe

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