The Accordionists Son

Bernardo Atxaga’s latest novel, The Accordionist’s Son, aims to expose the effects that the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath had on the collective conscious of the Basque people. However, it is not a novel of the war, nor is it record of the clandestine resistance that followed. It is a novel of a people and a place, about a way of living life that vanishes as soon as it hits the page. Into this world Atxaga has carefully injected the struggles and sufferings that can befall the oppressed. That he does so without sacrificing any of the everyday beauty that he has found in his people and their land is a testament to his power as a storyteller.

Bernardo Atxaga’s latest novel, The Accordionist’s Son, aims to expose the effects that the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath had on the collective conscious of the Basque people. However, it is not a novel of the war, nor is it record of the clandestine resistance that followed. It is a novel of a people and a place, about a way of living life that vanishes as soon as it hits the page. Into this world Atxaga has carefully injected the struggles and sufferings that can befall the oppressed. That he does so without sacrificing any of the everyday beauty that he has found in his people and their land is a testament to his power as a storyteller.

Set mostly in Franco, Spain, a generation after the reign had firmly established power, The Accordionist’s Son charts the protagonist’s, David’s, coming of age in the heart of Basque country. As he grows, he divides his time between his maternal uncle’s ancestral farm and the rapidly modernizing village that his parents call home – two worlds that become increasingly hard to reconcile as time passes. Even as the protective sphere of childhood is pieced by the pressures of the outside world, David’s internal angst is increasingly being caused by events that occurred long before he was born. He slowly begins to discover below the surface of his ever changing world lies the unrecorded horrors of recent history:

The story he told me that day – I would say – led me to suspect Angel of having been involved during the war in persecutions and executions, something for which no adolescent is prepared, however cool his relationship with his father might be. But when I think about it now, I believe he was right: if I hadn’t had those suspicions about Angel, I would never have struggled. If I hadn’t struggled, I would never have become strong. If I hadn’t become strong, I would never have been able to move on.

Atxaga artfully weaves this struggle to cope with historical and familial shame into the character development of his young protagonist. This subtly gives a voice to a collective cultural burden – to keep the history of the suffering from vanishing without being consumed by it. From David’s suspicions another world emerges, where the ghosts of the war refuse to stay dead and familial guilt becomes unavoidable. In his struggle to move on, he develops new ways of coping with the silence and begins to recognize the same burden of history in those around him:

I watched him stirring his coffee. With his glasses, his thin face, and his cigarette, he seemed to be the man I was used to seeing, our science teacher. But beneath that appearance, I was beginning to glimpse a second Cesar, who was looking with his Second Eyes and speaking with his Second Tongue.

With his “Second World” evermore present and the once edenic Obaba unbearably jaded, David turns irreversibly away from the official version of history. Using David’s “Second World” Ataxga tells the story that cannot be told on the surface; the story of what happens when victims and victors, the oppressed and the oppressors all live across the street. The conceit of David’s “Second World” adds an incredible amount of psychological depth to the narrative, emotionally charging everyday interaction with the struggle to contain the collective secrets of Obaba.

In employing this layered and complex narrative, Bernardo Atxaga brings the recent past to light without diminishing the mysteriously foreign and beautiful world that he has created. And it is another world that Atxaga has created, so particular in the details of both the land and its inhabitants that Obaba feels organic like few fictional worlds have. Atxaga’s ability to so effectively evoke the feelings of place gives the town of Obaba a synecdochic effect – Obaba is Franco, Spain in the same way that William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is the post-Reconstruction South and Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo is Latin America. Such mastery of place has allowed Atxaga to create a living record of this untold history, one above and beyond what even the best revisionist historicist could hope to accomplish.