Synopsis
"You're our mother and this is your country," I shouted at her, anything to stop her pain. "We don't care about that Middle Ages nonsense over there."
But "over there" in his mother's natal Basque village, Pete finds himself stepping back into a medieval morality, into the rigid and unrelenting code of his ancestors, older and stronger than reason.
Denied by his own blood kin, cold anger forges his determination to pierce the silence of the villagers and learn the circumstances of his mother's birth.
One by one the ghosts rise up. Jeanne, beautiful and headstrong, who carried her head too high and invited a disaster she would defiantly embrace. Garat, her father, solid and unyielding as the stone of his ancestral house. Maitia, the golden child who would be Pete's mother, born to the hellish accompaniment of rough music that was the village's supreme censure for her mother's violation of the moral code.
On the day of her First Communion, Maitia's cold baptism into the realm of shame killed forever her smile of innocence and stiffened a resolve that would last her lifetime. All her passion would be distilled toward one end - gaining the respect that, finally, could only be found across the sea, in America.
Interwoven is the story of Petya, Pete's father, forced by accident to flee the high Pyrenees and find a new life as a lonely sheepherder in the northern deserts of Nevada. His struggles with loneliness and the temptations of emerging manhood provide a background for the stark reality of a young immigrant whose pain and growing sense of self-determination transform him into the essential being we know as American.
In Robert Laxalt's earlier works he has written hauntingly of the beauty of his ancestral Basque homeland. Now, in the second volume of his Basque family trilogy, he lifts the veil that conceals the subtle cruelties of those fierce guardians of private scandal, the villagers who will keep from the world what is dear to them.
Reviews
In his novel The Basque Hotel, Laxalt explored the immigrant experience through the eyes of Peter, a Basque-American boy growing up in Nevada during the Depression. In the elegant second volume of this family trilogy, Peter journeys to his parents' native land to learn more about his mother's secret past. The "child" in the title is the narrator's mother, Maitia, whose life has been tainted by her illegitimacy. Laxalt brings a mythopoeic solemnity to the reconstructed experiences of both Maitia, growing up in a tiny Basque village, and Petya, a youth whose family sends him to the American West after he witnesses a murder. Though the characters seem limited--perhaps deliberately--to two dimensions, the Basque countryside and the American desert where Petya finds work as a shepherd spring to life in the writer's direct and unadorned style. The impecunious Basques of the village of Donibanesp ok and their rich sense of tradition are evoked through details: young Petya wears his father's mismatched suit, a hand-me-down from his deceased grandfather, who was buried in his nightshirt because "the suit would have been wasted beneath the ground in the churchyard." A subtle novel, illuminating and worthwhile.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Part of the publisher's "Basque" series, this novel by Basque American Laxalt explores the effect of cultural taboos (in this case, illegitimacy) on a family and its descendants. The Basque American narrator, who uncovers his mother's long-kept secret shame (her illegitimate birth) as he prepares to visit the land of his ancestors, is spurred to discover the truth of this secret when he is introduced by one of his cousins as an American friend instead of a blood relation. The story unfolds like a collapsed telescope into a past connected to the present. The language is simple, the story poignant and dignified. Recommended for literary collections.
- Linda L. Rome, Middlefield P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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