Obabakoak: A Novel.

New York, NY Random House: Vintage International, 1994. Paperback First Edition Thus; First Printing indicated. First Edition Thus; First Printing indicated. Very Good in Wraps: shows indications of careful use: slight spine lean; light wear to extremities, with some creases near the lower front corner and another, fainter crease near the upper front corner; the pages have tanned a bit, due to aging; the binding remains secure; text clean. Not without flaw, but remains structurally sound and tightly bound: clean, sturdy, presentable. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. 326pp. Trade Paperback. I'd never read any Basque literature before reading OBABAKOAK. Probably that was because there isn't a lot of it. Many Basque writers might have written in Spanish or French--maybe that's one reason why--and then for centuries, Basque was always given low status, "not modern", "just for villagers", "not a proper language", and so on. So, I was very curious to know what kind of novel would come out of Euskadi, that region on both sides of the Pyrenees inhabited by an ancient people with a unique language. Now I know. The answer is....a very strange one. OBABAKOAK reminded me of one of those intricate Chinese balls carved from ivory in which there's a whole series of smaller and smaller balls inside. They have not been placed there, no, they were carved from one piece of ivory. OBABAKOAK is above all a paean to literature---life is nothing but a collection of stories, and stories can only reflect life. We may be born in small towns like Obaba with definite character, but when we depart to swim in wider seas, we lose the ability to go back, all the old mysteries of childhood remain just that, though we may try to unravel them from remote distances in time. Nothing is what it seems, though everything is, as in a dream, quite familiar. We turn to stories then, trying to explain life and loss to ourselves. That lizard of longing penetrates our brains. Perhaps we may even go crazy if we persist. Myths and superstitions loom large. We must give up the search for truth even if the desire to continue remains. OBABAKOAK means "the things having to do with Obaba village" and so, I supposed, it would be a novel about life or lives in a Basque village. Wrong ! While Obaba does play some role, the tales are far more wideranging---in time, subject and place---the Amazon, Hamburg, 9th century France, Baghdad, the Himalayas, some mythical Chinese cit, plagiarism, sex changes, murder, and escape. Nobody can escape their fate. Atxaga is intoxicated by literature, by the art of the story. His characters are both fictional and fictional-within-fiction. I often felt that the book had dissolved into a collection of diffuse stories with few connections. While most of the stories were indeed engrossing, some magical, some clever, some sharply didactic, I wondered why they belonged together. A couple characters from within the stories told did emerge into the overall story---that Chinese ball effect again---but many did not. Atxaga writes with a dry humor and a certain irreverence which I liked very much, but if there were literary allusions, I have to concede that I could not pick them up. The novel may fascinate you for some hours, but in the end, you may find yourself puzzled. They say that even the devil couldn't learn Basque. Maybe he couldn't really understand OBABAKOAK either.