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Loading... Obabakoak (original 1989; edition 1989)by Bernardo Atxaga
Work InformationObabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga (1989)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Excellent storytelling. Something complementary to Calvino (apparent even before the marco polo piece). ( ) The edition I read labels the book as a novel right on the cover below the title. I think I have a pretty open-minded threshold for what constitutes a novel, but in the first half I couldn't see any reason to see the book in that light. Rather, here were a collection of short vignettes grouped into broad categories and of varying degrees of appeal. Ostensibly the unifying element was the titular village of Obaba, but it rarely seemed really important that the setting was this fictitious village--as though the author might just as well have collected together some unrelated stories and added in a reference to the place name "Obaba" after the fact in order to justify the collection. (There was also, inexplicably, one section--about 60 pages, almost a fifth of the total book--which was set in a different village called Villamediana). The second half finds a way to interestingly frame its stories and weave them together in an overarching narrative, to bring the past stories back in reference to later ones, but I should say that the stories of the first half weren't BAD for lacking this quality. I only mean to say that the book walks a confusing line by calling itself a novel and yet resembling far more an anthology of short works. I read this book while also reading Mark Kurlansky's "A Basque History of the World", which served as a very interesting companion. Atxaga's book largely avoids the political issues surrounding his Basque heritage (except toward the very end) and indeed many of his stories have an international quality, some taking place in South America, another in China, others in Germany, but the existence of his book is inherently related to the Basque struggle for self-determination. It was somewhat sad to me to see that what I was reading was a translation from a translation. The book could apparently not be translated directly from Euskera (Basque) to English but from the Spanish translation. Fortunately, it is a translation from the author's own Spanish translation, so we can feel confident that not too much has been lost in fidelity to the original, and as Atxaga himself asserts in his sign-off at the end, the advent of a distinctly Basque literature appears to be waxing rather than sputtering out, with the market for such works expanding. Perhaps as this trends continues there will come to be translators capable of transmitting the works of Basque authors directly to readers from other parts of the world. The Prologue--a poem in which the author discusses his language--was perhaps my favorite part, in particular where he gives the words for the sun in winter and the sun in spring. no reviews | add a review
One of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries, Obabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial novel about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic, Basque village. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, whilst everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page. Obabakoak is a dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts and literary theory, all held together by Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)899.923Literature Literature of other languages Other Literature: Pacific Islands, Basque, Artificial Languages, Georgia, Mesopotamia Other miscellaneous and artifical languages Basque Basque fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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