Obabakoak [Hardcover]

Bernardo Atxaga (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 1994

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From 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
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing (October 12, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517130939
• ISBN-13: 978-0517130933
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,895,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Basking in the light of literature, February 3, 2007

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Obabakoak: A Novel (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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Synopsis not totally correct., May 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Obabakoak: A Novel (Paperback)

Originally written in Basque language, the book was translated into spanish by the writer himself. The novel is built as a compilation of entirely fictional short stories and has nothing to do with the real life in a "exotic Basque village", as the synopsis says. It is not the aim of the author to represent the reality of life in the Basque country. In fact, the action could be located anywhere in the world

2 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A BASQUE MAGIC WORLD, September 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Obabakoak: A Novel (Hardcover)

A lot of good short stories written by one of the best basque authors. A great book in order to get know that country.