Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

From the Publisher

The most famous novel by Spain’s premier Basque novelist, re-jacketed for a whole new set of readers. Obabakoak is a novel composed of twenty-six linked tales and parodies.

Publishers Weekly

This loosely structured novel centered on a remote Basque village portrays life as a perilous journey in which chance and free will intervene in equal measures. An unobtrusively dazzling collage of seemingly unrelated stories, town gossip, diary excerpts and literary theory, all held together by Atxaga's distinctive, tenderly ironic voice, it won Spain's National Prize for Literature. The Basque novelist and poet peoples the town of Obaba and its environs with a lovelorn schoolmistress, a cultured but self-hating dwarf, a schoolboy whose mining engineer father tricks him into growing up and an environmentalist who rescues lizards after playing wicked tricks with them as a youth. Atxaga also spins tales of a German painter driven mad by guilt over his romance with an Arab woman; of an Irish woman in search of her doctor husband who is missing in the Amazon jungle; and of a rescue mission on a Swiss mountain climbing expedition in Nepal that turns to murder. (Apr.)

Library Journal

In the prolog to this novel, Atxaga explains the intricacies of his native culture: ``I write in a strange language. Its verbs, the structure of its relative clauses, have no sisters anywhere on Earth.'' Translated into English from the author's own Spanish translation of the original text written in Basque, the work has everything to do with the language of a people and culture living on the fringes of society. Like the single-laned, rutted, dirt roads that link the sparsely populated villages in the fictitious region of Obaba, Atxaga (a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez) has compiled a series of independent and interrelated stories that introduce the reader to a cross-section of Obaban society. Through the eyes of these numerous protagonists, who can vary from chapter to chapter, Atxaga reviews and foreshadows the paralyzing effect superstition and myth-making can have on the individual and society. He both respects and fears the inherent introversion of his people--so ably reflected in a language spoken by only a handful of human beings. Obabakoak , winner of Spain's National Prize for Literature, is a tribute to the Basque people's language and culture.-- David H. Miller, New York

What People Are Saying

A. S. Byatt
"Atxaga is a brilliantly inventive writer...Obabakoak is at once terribly moving and wildly funny."

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