The Ballybeg of the Basque Country

Bernardo Atxaga has been nominated as one of the '21 writers for the 21st century', and the impact of his fiction is the more remarkable for its being written in Euskera, the language of the Basques, writes Paddy Woodworth

The Basque shepherds who emigrated to Nevada, east California and Idaho in the 19th century led chronically isolated lives. To alleviate that solitude, they made remarkable carvings on trees in lost canyons. Sometimes they left no more than an initial and a date, with little personal flourishes; sometimes they attempted elaborate erotic fantasies, at once crude and heartbreakingly tender. Today, scholars attempt to decipher the human lives that found expression and memory only through the point of a hunting knife. We can know very little of these men's lives, but we can know something.

The need to make a mark, to leave some trace of a life that is slipping away, also grips David, the Basque protagonist of Bernardo Atxaga's latest novel, The Accordionist's Son, who finds himself in 1990s California under very different circumstances from those of the shepherds.

"I have decided," he tells his American wife, Mary Ann, "to make my own carving." As cancer carries him to an early death on his emigrant uncle's ranch, a place he reckons is as close to paradise as he is ever likely to get, he leaves a memoir of his extraordinary life for his daughters.

David, we learn, grew up in Obaba. This is a fictionalised version of Asteasu, a small town caught between industrial modernity and the atavistic Basque rural past where Atxaga himself grew up in the 1960s. The author has frequently used Obaba as a literary landscape, much as Brian Friel uses "Ballybeg" in many of his short stories and plays.

The title of his first and best-known novel, Obabakoak(1989), translates as "People of Obaba". In this book, Atxaga (pronounced At-cha-ga, with the emphasis on the second syllable) shows his skill at exploring the human universe through the lens of a village. He faithfully captures the micro-histories and idiosyncrasies of his remarkable native place, yet he places them seamlessly in a context of contemporary pleasures, dilemmas and anxieties familiar to readers with no knowledge of the Basque Country.

This all the more remarkable because he writes in Euskera, a language spoken by only a few hundred thousand people. He has broken out of this isolated parish to reach a broad international audience and, in 1999, the Observer nominated him as one of its "21 writers for the 21st century".

Long before that, he had derived a certain ironic satisfaction from winning the Spanish National Literary Prize for his translation into Spanish of Obabakoak. The Basques used to be told to "write in the language of the empire" by the Franco dictatorship; now they had learned to write back, in both languages, and success was the best revenge.

For Atxaga, however, writing in Basque is not some kind of political flag-waving. It is perfectly natural, he argues, to write in the language one speaks. He is deeply committed to the survival of Euskera, but he would feel that this commitment is best vindicated by the words of Unai Elorriaga, from the next generation of Basque writers, who became the second Basque-language writer to win the same prize in 2002. Younger than Atxaga, Elorriaga had grown up under post-Franco democracy, learning Euskera at school.

"We are not so fixated on the language issue," Elorriaga said on winning the prize. "What concerns us is to write good literature."

ALWAYS A CITIZEN of the broad literary world, the early Atxaga borrowed freely from the magic realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Marquez, and from the playful intertextuality of much contemporary European writing. His first narrators included snakes and squirrels, eavesdropping on human conversations that were so strangely fascinating that you soon took for granted that the tale was being told by an animal.

Even when the narrator was human, things could get very strange. In Obabakoak, a boy suffers lifelong dementia after a lizard is introduced into his ear by a classmate. But our take on this story is destabilised when we find that its narrator is starting to suffer from the same disturbed condition. He has painstakingly tracked down the cause of the boy's madness from a school photograph, but his writing begins to disintegrate as he gets too close to his source, and is forced to spend the night in a shed full of lizards.

Fiction and biography interweave constantly in Atxaga's work. A photograph very similar to the one described in Obabakoakwas actually taken of his own primary-school class (see above). While no lizard is visible in this, the image is both part of the painful public record of recent Basque history, and material for Atxaga's narrative. Joseba Arregui, standing a few places from the author in the picture, did indeed become a member of Eta, the Basque separatist group, and was tortured to death by the Spanish security forces, just as Obabakoakrelates.

Walking with Atxaga through Asteasu a year ago, I found that he switched equally fluently in conversation between the everyday, the dramatic and the downright bizarre. He praised the quality of the tomatoes in the shop next to his old home, then pointed out Joseba Arregui's ruined farmhouse, abandoned by his family after his death. He matter-of-factly recounted incidents and stories from his own childhood that were as fantastic as anything in his writing: a house near his school which disappeared during morning classes; a rabid boy tethered in a hole and fed like a dog by his distraught mother.

POLITICALLY, ATXAGA DESCRIBES himself as standing uncomfortably in the middle of an angry torrent, between the mutually hostile banks of Spanish and Basque nationalism. Accused by some Spanish writers of "ambiguity" towards Eta's terrorism, and by some Basque nationalists of lack of commitment to their cause, Atxaga eschews moral denunciation.

Instead, he offers the reader intimate empathy with his characters, while subtly distancing us from their ideologies, especially through the recurrent device of the unreliable narrator.

Politics loom largest in some of his more recent novels, such as The Lone Man(nominated for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 1998) and The Lone Woman, perceptive psychological portraits of individuals struggling to emerge from the shadowlands of their past in Eta. But politics is always less important to him than deeper concerns with sex, madness and death, zones where magic and fantasy keep seeping through the membrane of rationality.

The Accordionist's Sonrecapitulates many of the themes of his earlier work with great assurance. It is a bleak yet affectionate vision of the heartland so often romanticised by Basque nationalism.

In the 1930s, a small group of liberals look out from one of its cosy bars towards a country "so green outside, so dark within; a black province subject to an equally black religion". They will be shot in the church porch when the Spanish fascists take the village, with active support from many of the Basque-speaking villagers. Loyalties, we discover, do not follow the predictable channels beloved of ideologues.

David grows up in the 1960s, and tries to make sense of this hidden past and of his own youth, when Eta is trying to remake the Basque Country in its own image. His involvement with the revolutionaries leads to a very ambiguous betrayal. He goes into voluntary and idyllic exile in the Californian countryside, but, in a nod to magic realism, an inner cricket reminds him of mortality, beating its wings in frantic panic as his illness takes a final hold.

He tries to interest his American daughters in his ancestral language, symbolically burying words which have fallen out of use in matchboxes in the local graveyard. These are words such as pinpilinpauxa for butterfly, the syllables of which, he thinks, are a kind of visual onomatopoeia, mimicking the butterfly's flickering and dipping flight. He imagines these Basque words evaporating like snow settling on warm ground, but then, when he overhears his daughters inventing new words in the ancient language, he dreams of a world where it "snows upwards".

Throughout the book we are more or less aware that the narrator is unreliable, perhaps doubly so. The narrative we are reading has been carefully edited by David's best friend and former Eta comrade, Joseba (wheels within wheels: Bernardo Atxaga is a pseudonym for Joseba Irazu).

Joseba (in the book) is a writer who treads a fine line between loyalty and treachery, and who believes that truth can only be digested when wrapped in a tissue of fictions. The reader must decide whether his edited version has only been softened slightly out of respect for David's daughters' sensibilities, or distorted.

"Reality is sad," David tells his readers, according to Joseba's text, "and even the toughest books embellish it." Which makes David's own surprisingly upbeat funeral eulogy disturbingly ambiguous.

The Accordionist's Son, by Bernardo Atxaga, has just been published in English by Harvill Secker, £18.99. Atxaga's website is www.atxaga.org

Paddy Woodworth's book, The Basque Country: A Cultural History, has just been published in the US by Oxford University Press; woodworth@ireland.com; www.paddywoodworth.com