Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga Vintage $72 BERNARDO Atxaga is a 32-year-old Basque novelist who writes in the virtually unknown language of euskera.
In an afterword to Obabakoak, he tells us that the literature in euskera which has evaded loss or destruction by tyrants is so sparse that he had read everything available in his native tongue by the time he was 23. He only started when he was 20.
As we sometimes see in West Indian or African writers who are thrust into the 20th century's internationalised culture, Mr Atxaga shoulders the burden of representing his nation's cultural heritage even as he himself is creating it.
He has already won several Spanish literary awards (writing both in Spanish and euskera); Obabakoak won the Spanish National Literature Prize in 1989 and was shortlisted for the European Literary Prize in 1990. Now it is available in English.
Structurally, Obabakoak is an extraordinary book which will challenge the casual reader and pique the imagination of the literary specialist. It will frustrate everyone.
It will disappoint casual readers because the good story they will look for develops in interesting, well-paced ways and then veers off into such awful anti-climaxes one imagines Mr Atxaga deliberately found the least appealing conclusion he could and dumped it on us, sneering all the while.