Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

But I couldn't find that last word. I would look out of the window, I would watch the waves of the sea rising and breaking and I would ask the waves for an answer, but it was no use. Then I asked the stars in the sky and it was the same. I asked other people and that was even worse. I mean they were no help at all, they always ended up leaving me alone again in front of the blank page. And then I would think to myself: Why don't you tell the story of the journey you made to Obaba? Maybe in recounting the events of the weekend you'll find the wretched word.

"For a man already in the autumn of his life," writes Esteban Werfell, the title character of the first story in Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak, "a few short hours may not seem a matter of much significance, but it is all I have to tell, indeed it is the only thing worth telling." The story he tells goes like this: one day, compelled by his friends, he visits church for the first time, much to the chagrin of his father, an atheist who longs for the cultured atmosphere of his home city of Hamburg. At church Esteban faints and has a vision of a beautiful young girl, who also lives in Hamburg, and tells him her name and address there. For years, Esteban and the girl maintain a correspondence, and Esteban grows estranged from his rustic Basque friends, choosing instead to spend his time studying the subjects which will make worthy of his foreign love. Years later, after the correspondence has long since ceased, he visits the house in Hamburg, where he discovers an old friend of his father: as it turns out, it was his father who wrote the letters all along.

Obabakoak, whose name means something like "The stories of the people from Obaba," is, according to its prologue, one of less than a hundred books published in the Basque language. "Esteban Werfell" records the pride and anxiety of such a project, the specter of a more cultivated Europe, behind which the Basque country badly lags. And yet, Esteban, as far as we can tell, writes his story from his home in Obaba, where he remains, looking out the window at the swans.

Obabakoak collects several stories, most of which--but not all--center on this fictional Basque town. In "An exposition of Canon Lizardi's letter," a white boar that rampages through Obaba is suspected of being the spirit of a poor and hated child, who has returned to wreak his revenge on those who hurt him. In "Post tenebras spero lucem," one of my favorites, a young Spanish teacher stationed in Obaba's most remote corner--what must feel like the ends of the earth--becomes scandalously close to the young orphan who lights the furnace for the schoolroom each morning. These stories offer a vision of the Basque country as a kind of Brigadoon, a place that is so hard to reach most people don't know it's there, and where myths and superstitions remain, thriving in isolation from the wider world. A long story called "Nine Words in Honour of the Village of Villamediana" substitutes for Obaba the title village, but the place is recognizable with whatever name: in this story, a traveler looking for isolation strikes up an unlikely friendship with a poet-dwarf claiming to be the last descendant of the region's former Count.

The full second half of Obabakoak is taken by a wonderfully rambling collection called "In Search of the Last Word." The unnamed narrator of this story, having discovered an old photograph of his grade school class, suspects that the class troublemaker is responsible for making another student go deaf and mad by sticking a lizard in his ear. He and a friend set out to uncover the truth on their way to a storytelling party thrown in Obaba by the narrator's uncle; the resolution of the lizard question is waylaid again and again by stories and storytellers who appear to break up the narrative. In one sense, "In Search of the Last Word" seems like a clever framework in which to fit several fun but unrelated stories, but in another, the stories--and their dilatory nature--warn us that the resolution the narrator seeks will be elusive, that our expectations for how a story should unfold, or end, will be thwarted.