The Accordionist's Son (Hardcover)

by Bernardo Atxaga (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harvill Secker (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1843432803
• ISBN-13: 978-1843432807
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,054,689 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Were we, he and I and our fellow [Basque] countrymen, the equivalent of the last Mohican?", March 15, 2009

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: The Accordionist's Son: A Novel (Lannan Translation) (Hardcover)

By the time he is eight years old, David Imaz, like his father, is an "artist" at his craft--a fine accordionist--growing up in the Basque community of Obaba, near Guernica. Forty-two years later, in 1999, the accordion is put away, and David's Basque friend Joseba is visiting David's widow Mary Ann, not in Basque country, but in Three Rivers, California, where David has been raising thoroughbred horses for more than twenty-five years. Mary Ann has a mission for Joseba--to take one of the three copies of a book that David has written in Basque back to the library in Obaba.

David's story includes his involvement in the history of his village, and it reveals important discoveries he made about other people, including some from his own family. Nine local people, thought to have been against the military dictatorship and sympathetic to the revolution, were executed at the outset of the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939), and David believes that his own father was involved in these executions.

David prefers the country life to life in town, and it is through his travels back and forth between town and country, that he eventually learns the true history of the town in the years before he was born. By June, 1970, David, aged 22, has finished his fourth year of university, and the political situation in his Basque homeland has seriously deteriorated. The bombing of a recently erected marble monument, created to honor the fascists who fought with Franco during the Civil War, 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.

The Basque setting and the events of the Spanish Civil War, which drive the plot, are less important than the characters and the crises they face. As Atxaga recreates the culture, and the people who live within it, he also includes homey details, and the reader sees how much like the rest of us these people are, despite the obvious cultural differences. 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 naïve youths caught in a whirlwind that has taken their lives out of control.

As the author sprinkles moments of dark humor throughout the novel to offer relief from the violence and the seriousness of the main issues, he adds 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. n Mary Whipple

Obabakoak

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Complex coming of age stories in a dramatic setting, April 18, 2009

By	John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Accordionist's Son: A Novel (Lannan Translation) (Hardcover)

This novel joins two Basque eras of conflict-- the Spanish Civil War and the ETA struggle-- by a triple narrative. Translated from Basque into first Spanish and then English, the tone seems diffused and distant. It's both evocative and muted, qualities that may or may not have been in the original Euskara.

Distance suffuses this story, told by Joseba about his childhood friend David. They both wind up in California, and David's premature death leads Joseba to translate David's self-published memoir into English for David's wife and children. Along the way, the novel includes its most gripping part, the centerpiece story "Obaba's First American," about Don Pedro, who hid Juan, David's uncle, from the Fascist forces who overran their Basque village. We learn later why David left the Basque country to come to his Central California ranch, and in the near present, why Joseba also left their native place of Obaba to stay with David's family.

In turn, the story shifts from the mid-1930s to the 1960s, when the Basque nationalists began to dare to take on the Franco dictatorship. We learn such crucially telling details as the prohibition of the Basque language even on gravestones, of the illegality of a Basque-Spanish dictionary, and of the suppression by the Church as well as the State following the defeat of those who opposed the Spanish rule after the Thirties. We also see the rebirth of resistance from the end of the Sixties onward.

However, the tales that David tells through Joseba ramble. Lots of characters and flirtations and relatives flit in and out, but few characters stand out. They blur together too much, amidst a surprisingly understated landscape. There's little of the memorable descriptions that would make the power of these events stick. It's all rather interesting, but sameness accumulates for long stretches. The tone's affable, but too much of David's growing up in a modernizing era lacks the freshness we'd expect.

I did appreciate the momentary nod to how language changes our perceptions: the peasants never talked about paranoia or neuroticism; they'd be happy or unhappy; similarly, the force of hearing "privitization" or "imperialism" for the first time in the countercultural undercurrent diminishes in time into tired cant. The feel of the novel is one of intense surges fizzling out over time's humdrum routine.

The best section, the "First American" part, proves the summit of Atxaga's skill. It moves with a vigor lacking in much of what surrounds it. Joseba very late seems to acknowledge the disparity between David's more stolid tellings and his own "improvements" in the framing device that holds down the central portions and links to the more fictional retellings (it gets a bit complex, no surprise given his previous novel of interlinked stories in a magic realist kaleidoscope, "Obabakoak").

I think that Joseba's coming-of-age story, so closely chronological with Atxaga's own date of birth, may have dragged the novel down into too many semi- autobiographical correspondences that may be more vivid in Euskada (or even Spanish) than in English. We get embedded transcriptions of the Basque within the story, as if explanations must interrupt the original, and these do push the reader away from the events a bit.

Atxaga through both tellers does, still, leap away from the more mundane recital in his reversion near the end to three "confessions" of three ETA-type (the affiliation appears to be deliberately muddled) comrades arrested by the Spanish for terrorism. As in the "Deck of Cards" intermission, the dramatically and eloquently conveyed registers of Joseba's voice retell David's memories in a markedly more engrossing style. I understand what Atxaga in these moments breaks through three languages and three levels of discourse to show us, but it's a lot of effort for the reader to get to these moments of true literary power.

Yet, this may be Atxaga's hard-won lesson for readers used to less effort to capture the truth on the page that witnesses to the emotion felt by those for whom the Basque homeland was more than a place erased from the Spanish (or French) map. He helps us realize the intensity for which a few of his countrymen and women have for so long kept alive an utterly unique way of expression in a Europe that the Basque people have occupied longer than anyone else on the continent. For this exposure, it's worth the languors of much of the story. As in hiking up a dull scree to a dazzling vista on top of the mountain, one must put in the discipline for a glimpse at a culture so rarely seen, the chance to eavesdrop on the only surviving pre-Indo-European language and to see its words in print. This sight brings its own reward.