Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Obabakoak
One of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries, Obabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial novel about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic, Basque village. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, whilst everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page. Obabakoak is a dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts and literary theory, all held together by Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice.
Seven Houses in France
1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the banks of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafés of Paris. His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad. At the Captain’s side are an ex-legionnaire womaniser, and a servile, treacherous man who dreams of running a brothel. At their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.
Memoirs of a Basque Cow
One dark and stormy night, Mo hears her Inner Voice urging her to begin writing her memoirs. Having ignored her Inner Voice’s advice once before, with near-fatal consequences, she decides, this time, to do as she is told. Mo looks back on her life, beginning with the crucial moment when she met another cow, who introduced herself as La Vache qui Rit, and assured Mo that there was nothing more stupid in this world than a stupid cow. Mo spends her life trying to prove to her friend that, despite being a cow, she is not at all stupid. Besides, she has her Inner Voice and a great desire to live! Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, in which defeated Republican supporters are still being persecuted by victorious Nationalists. Memoirs of a Basque Cow paints a funny, touching portrait of friendship and freedom and the sometimes difficult process of finding oneself. Translated by the UK's finest translator of Spanish, Margaret Jull Costa.
Waking the Hedgehog
"This analysis of the writings of Bernardo Atxaga is inspired by his image of the Basque language as a hedgehog that has "survived ... by withdrawing," but that has now emerged - preeminently in the work of this most international of Basque authors." "Following the trail of the hedgehog reveals the riches of contemporary Basque literature and Atxaga's central position in the Basque literary world. The book explores the enthusiastic global reception of Atxaga's fiction - in particular Obabakoak, which has been translated into twenty-six languages - but also his short stories, drama, poetry, and writings for children and young people. It focuses on the preeminence of the fantastic in Atxaga's work, the experimental style of his hybrid poetic texts, and the "heterotopias" of his realist novels."--BOOK JACKET.
Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation
Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún. In approaching the work of these authors, the book draws upon the approaches to translation offered by Benjamin, Derrida, Ricœur and Deleuze to highlight a broad set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual a...
Lone Man
Two Basque gunmen on the run after a bomb attack find refuge in a hotel whose owner, Carlos, used to belong to their movement. With the World Cup in progress, the Polish football team is staying in the hotel. A television crew is infiltrated by undercover agents.
Water over Stones
A story of intertwining lives that, like water, run between stones. From childhood friends in a bakery in the mining town of Ugarte, Basque Country, to a group of comrades and their pet magpie in a military base in the dying days of Franco's dictatorship, and eventually adults with the weight of their existence on their backs, the interconnected stories of the protagonists of Water over Stones span several decades of Spanish history, as Ugarte moves from the hazy summer of the 1972 Olympics, through the mining strikes of the turbulent Eighties, and into the modern day. Water over Stones is an extraordinary novel of friendship, nature, love and the immensity of death. Once again, Atxaga shows his mastery in creating places and characters that are impossible to forget. Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Margaret Jull-Costa
Two Brothers
An elegiac tale of lost innocence and the ruthlessness of the natural world, where the hunter all too soon becomes the prey. As he dies leaving his two boys orphans, Paulo's father lays on him the duty to look after his retarded but overgrown younger brother, for otherwise Daniel will be put away in an institution. But Daniel never listens to his brother, who is unable to exert any authority over him. Instead Daniel, aged twenty and still in the throes of puberty, goes off in an inept, fumbling pursuit of the village girls, as they ride past on their bicycles on the way to sewing lessons or cake-baking classes. Among these girls are pretty Teresa and her plain friend, Carmen, a girl disfigured by a birthmark on one cheek. Both of them are sweet on Paulo, the quiet, irresolute but handsome lad who works in the family sawmill, while Teresa is the reluctant, indeed disgusted, object of Daniel's dreams. Each girl schemes to cut the other out and win favour with Paulo. All ends in tears. And the narrators of this story, who take turns to continue the tale, are creatures of the wild, driven by their inner voices - a bird, squirrels, a black snake.
Nevada Days
Nevada Days is a fictionalised account of Atxaga's nine months' stay as writer-in-residence at the Centre for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada. He is accompanied by his wife, Ángela, who is also doing research there, and by their two daughters. During their first few weeks, the family encounter a strange mapache (racoon), which is always staring at them from the garden, a flight of helicopters immediately overhead, a black widow spider, a warning about bears, a party of prisoners in the desert, a lake that is somehow far too calm and too blue, and, not long into their stay, the kidnap and murder of a young girl living in the house right next door. Atxaga tells us about all these s...
The Lone Man
A Barcelona hotelier hides two Basque separatists and begins living off his nerves as the hotel is filled with police guarding a foreign soccer team. The World Cup is on. The hotelier, an ex-Basque revolutionary, cannot decide whether he is taking such risk out of nobility of spirit or boredom.
