Viviendo en lo global: una identidad vasca en Bernardo Atxaga

Abstract

In The Son of the Accordion Player, novelist Bernardo Atxaga proposes a new model of Basque identity for the 21st century, a model that distances itself from Romantic notions of identification linked to language, land, and ethnicity. David, the protagonist of the novel, is immersed in a long process of self and collective discovery, one that puts him at first on the road to political violence in the name of Basque identity if only to “survive” this terror and discover through the power of writing a more subdued and tranquil cultural identity that he then learns to pass on. This new model he discovers wrestles with the violences of the Spanish Civil War and of the Franco dictatorship in order to put them to rest. Writing, the writing of The Son of the Accordion Player, becomes a site for a version of memory free from melancholia and of impossible redemption.