A perceptive, moving novel about life and death in the Basque Country, from the author of Nevada Days Bernardo Atxaga’s Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his uncle’s bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He’s been silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for reasons unknown. With the assistance of twin brothers who take him to a river in the forest, he’ll recover his speech. As the years pass, those twins, now adults, will be part of a mining strike in the Ugarte region, and so take up the mantle of the narrative, just as others will after them. Water over Stones is similar in nature to Atxaga’s earlier books Obabakoak and The Accordionist’s Son, as it weaves in themes of friendship, nature, and death. Yet in capturing a span of time from the early 1970s, when the shadow of the Franco dictatorship still loomed, to 2017, when these boys must learn to leave their old beliefs behind and move on, Atxaga finds new richness and depth in familiar subjects. As threads of water run over stones in the river, so these lives run together, and, over time, technology and industry bring new changes as the wheel of life turns.
Author
Bernardo Atxaga (Joseba Irazu Garmendia, Asteasu, Guipúzcoa, 1951) belongs to the young group of Basque writers that began publishing in his mother language, Euskara, in the Seventies. Graduated in Economics for the Bilbao University, he later studied Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His first short story, Ziutateaz was published in 1976 and his first book of poetry Etiopia in 1978. Both works received the National Critics Prize for the best works in the Basque language. He cultivates most genres: poetry, radio, cinema scriptwriting, theatre, children's books, articles, short stories... His national –and soon after international– recognition arrived with Obabakoak (1988) which, among other prizes, was awarded the National Literature Prize 1989 and that has been translated into more than twenty languages. Many of his poems have also been translated into other languages and published by prestigious magazines such as Jahbuch der Lyrik, 1993, Die horen, 1995, Lichtungen, 1997 (Germany), Lyrikklubbss bibliotek, 1993 (Sweden), Vuelta, 1990 (Mexico), Linea d'ombra, 1992 (Italy) and others.
