The Deep Blue Memory (The Basque Series) - Hardcover

Laxalt Urza, Monique

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874172128 ISBN 13: 9780874172126

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 1993

Synopsis

Monique Laxalt Urza's first novel is an intimate portrait of a second-generation Basque-American who struggles to reconcile her memories of the simplicity of the past with the reality of change in the present. The Deep Blue Memory is a fictionalized story of immigration told from the point of view of the granddaughter of Basque immigrant grandparents and daughter of a prominent first-generation family. The Deep Blue Memory addresses themes central to all of human existence. In particular, the book examines the eternal human search for identity that at the level of the first generation is forward-looking, but at the level of the grandchildren of immigrants, too often looks backward, clinging to images of a remembered past. The Deep Blue Memory treats the elements of time and knowledge, and of art and reality, as being intertwined. More than about any specific character, this book is about family—its make-up, its complexity, and its delicateness when resettled in America, the land of cataclysmic change.

About this title

About the Author

Author of Deep Blue Memory.

Reviews

An extended family of Basque Americans in Nevada perform a precarious balancing act between assimilation and affirmation of their ethnic roots in this lyrical, highly descriptive first novel. The nameless narrator, like the author a lawyer from Reno, recalls fond girlhood interactions with her immigrant grandfather, a rugged rancher who finds in Nevada's snowy terrain a sense of continuity with nature that the Basque country's green hills once afforded. She spends a year abroad with her parents, attending a French Basque grammar school at which she learns more about her heritage. The first American-born generation finds success and stress: the narrator's father is a writer, her Uncle Luke a U.S. senator whose opponents tarnish his image with a smear campaign. Luke's lawsuit to clear his name brings the clan together but also triggers the suicide of one member. In incantatory, at times self-indulgent prose, Urza conveys a sense of the family as an unbroken circle cradling both the individual and a living culture.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874172128
• ISBN 13: 9780874172126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176