El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga ed. by Iker González-Allende, and José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta

Abstract

Reviewed by: El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga ed. by Iker González-Allende, and José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta David Laraway González-Allende, Iker, and José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta, editors. El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga. Anthropos, 2018. Pp. 318. ISBN 978-8-41755-602-0. Few living writers know what it means to bear the weight of an entire literary tradition, representing it synecdochally to readers who lack linguistic access to its primary sources. Fewer still know what it is like to work in a language as poorly understood and as limited in its geographical and demographic reach as Euskera. In this regard, Bernardo Atxaga (the pseudonym of Joseba Irazu Garmendia) is in rare company and, although he is by no means the only author writing in the Basque language who currently enjoys a readership beyond the borders of Euskal Herria—his contemporary Ramon Saizarbitoria has found some success in translation, as have younger writers such as Kirmen Uribe—, his works remain, for most of his readers, their primary connection to the Basque-language literary tradition. If Atxaga remains for a majority of readers the primary point of entry into that tradition, then this new collection of essays provides a helpful on-ramp to Atxaga’s work for readers and scholars whose knowledge of him might be non-existent or limited to just one or two books. The title of this volume of Spanish-language essays, El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga, evokes the now-canonical declaration that originally appeared in the epilogue to the Spanish-language translation of Atxaga’s most celebrated book, Obabakoak (1989): “El mundo está en todas partes, y Euskal Herria ya no es solamente Euskal Herria, sino . . . el lugar donde el mundo toma el nombre de Euskal Herria” (10). The fourteen chapters that comprise El mundo está en todas partes (along with the editors’ introduction and a lengthy interview with Atxaga) aim to locate Atxaga’s literary worlds with respect to the broader literary and political worlds that encompass and interpenetrate them. If these essays share a common theme it is that, to borrow a concept from Annabel Martín’s excellent contribution to the volume, Atxaga’s work is shot through with a fascination for problems of scale and scalability, between the intimate details woven into his misleadingly unassuming and accessible tales and the abstract questions of ethics, politics, and one’s place in the world to which they seem to inevitably give rise. The essays gathered here are notable for not only the diversity of their concerns and the methodological tools that they bring to bear in the exploration of them, but the number and range of Atxaga’s texts that they examine. Obabakoak is far and away the most popular of his works and it is rightly the focus of a well-crafted essay (by José Manuel López de Abiada); so too are his other best sellers, including Gizona bere bakardadean (The Lone Man) (essay by Annabel Martín) and Soinujolearen semea (The Accordionist’s Son) (essay by Mari Jose Olaziregi). But perhaps the primary virtue of El mundo está en todas partes is the fact that Atxaga’s most canonical works do not monopolize the spotlight. An unusually broad cross-section of his texts receive attention here: these include his early avant-garde poetry (cf. the essay by Lourdes Otaegi Imaz on Etiopía) and his less heralded but otherwise important formal experiments gathered in Poemas & Híbridos (the subject of an illuminating study by Juan José Lanz). Often overlooked by critics but much appreciated by his Basque-language readers, Atxaga’s popular juvenile literature receives scrutiny here as well, in no fewer than three separate essays. And lesser known, more recent, texts such as Nevadako egunak (Days of Nevada) are the subject of the attention of some of Atxaga’s most celebrated scholars, including Jon Kortazar. It seems safe to say that these essays in particular are likely to provide essential reference points in the future as scholars increasingly turn their attention to some of his...