Basque in the Limelight

Bernardo Axtagas’s gripping political bildingsroman may be the first Basque masterpiece.

The characters of “The Accordionist’s Son,” the new novel from Basque intellectual and writer Bernardo Axtaga, would be outraged to know their story had been translated into English. In the book, translation is seen as a kind of desecration of language; one character solemnly buries old Basque words written on scraps of paper as if they were dead pets. Elsewhere, obsolete words are described as snowflakes melting “when they touched the ground of the new present.”

That defrosting present is where the novel begins, in 1999. David, the titular son, has just died at his ranch in California. By means of a somewhat tortuous plot device involving the melding of David’s memoir with another character’s partially-fictionalized memoir, the story soon jumps to the imaginary Basque town of Obaba, circa 1964. The Spanish Civil War has been over for decades, but its aftershocks are still being felt—especially by the younger generation. As the novel begins, David is just beginning to realize that his father, an accordionist ironically named Angél, was a facist.

Obaba serves as Axtaga’s Yoknapatawta, a rural area of the Basque country about which he’s written numerous times, including in his prize-winning book of short stories “Obabakoak.” In the past, Axtaga has used Obaba to tell stories of magical realism, but in “The Accordionist’s Son”, the town is the setting for an entirely realist political bildingsroman.

David tries in every way he can to come to terms with his father’s crimes. First, he rejects his own bourgeois lifestyle, retreating to the bucolic farmhouse of his uncle Juan. Later, he joins up with the Basque nationalists as a half-hearted terrorist. Finally, he allows himself to be wrongly convicted of betraying his fellow nationalists as a kind of penance.

The novel struck me as a variation on the theme of Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader” (which I reviewed here just a few weeks ago). In that book, one German woman’s war crimes stand in for those of an entire generation, and a young boy cannot quite escape the taint. In “The Accordionist’s Son”, the younger generation may be more active about their expiation, but they are no closer to finding peace. David is not an ideologue, or even an idealist. As a terrorist, his actions come across as desperate and unmotivated, as if he was merely carried along by the current of the times. It’s believable, but makes you wonder sometimes exactly why he was chosen as the novel’s protagonist.

“The Accordionist’s Son” works best in Obaba, where David bounces back and forth between the wealthy and the poor, the urban and the rural, the heirs of Republicanism and the heirs of Fascism. Particularly fascinating is Teresa, the daughter of another Nationalist. Though she falls deeply in love with David, he rejects her, because she represents the history he is trying to deny. Their scenes together run thick with tension both sexual and political:

The turntable began to spin, and the arm bearing the needle lifted automatically from its support. A woman’s voice emerged from the loudspeakers. It was a very slow, rather melancholy tune. “Who is it?” I asked. Teresa was still standing by the record-player. “Marie Laforêt.” She threw the record sleeve over to me on the bed. La plage. La vie s’en va. Those were the titles of the first two songs. Something fell to the floor, and I looked up. “I had a coin in my pocket,” Teresa said, her voice choked with emotion. She was naked. “I love you so much,” she said. These words robbed her of all her breath. “Come here,” I said, lying down on the bed.

The acoustics of this moment—the sound of a coin falling from a pair of pants removed in childish haste—are exquisite.

As David matures, growing into a revolutionary and then finding peace as a farmer (fulfilling Candide’s enigmatic counsel, after a lifetime of turmoil, to “cultivate our garden”), this light touch disappears. Jose, David’s lifelong friend, himself a Basque novelist, narrates the last section of the book, wrapping up the plot without adding much of nutritional value.

It’s a shame that David himself isn’t more interesting, but he’s lucky to be surrounded by a fascinating cast: his mother, the reluctant wife of a Fascist; his uncle, a Republican who risked his life to save an American during the war; Virginia, la paysanne, who loves David but leaves him when he becomes a revolutionary.

Thanks to them, and to the town of Obaba itself, “The Accordionist’s Son” eventually won me over. The novel brings to life a milieu rare in fiction (the book is described on its jacket as the first great Basque novel), one that would be worth reading about even if the writing were not so vivid. Like a literary Millet, Axtaga waxes lyrical about the rural life of Obaba without falling into a dull poeticism, never forgetting that the Basque country is “so green without, so dark within: a black province under the yoke of an equally black religion.”