Over the last few years I’ve reviewed a number of
“metafiction” works, from France Laurent Binet’s story of Heinrich Himmler and
him struggling with historical fiction, to the vast works of Karl Ove Knausgaard
who is struggling to write his opus whilst falling in love, having children and
being a dad. This time I visit the Basque Region of Spain and Kirmen Uribe’s
tale of his family history “Bilbao - New York - Bilbao”.
We know we’re possibly in for a bleak tale as soon as we
read the first page, a story of loss:
Fish and trees are alike. They’re
alike because of the growth rings. Trees have those in their trunks. Cut
through a tree trunk and there will be the rings. A year for each ring, and
that’s how you know what the tree’s age is. Fish have them, too, but in their
scales. And just as we do with trees, we know by those growth rings what the
animal’s age is.
Fish are always growing. Not us,
we start shrinking once we’ve reached maturity. Our growth stops and our bones
begin to knit together. A person shrivels. Fish, though, grow until they die.
Faster then they’re young, and as the years go on more slowly, but fish always
go on growing.
Winter creates the growth rings
of a fish. It’s the time when the fish eat least, and that time of hunger draws
a dark trace in the fish scale. In that winter season when the fish grows
least. Not in summer, though. When there’s no hunger there’s no trace at all
left behind in the fish scale.
The growth ring of a fish is
microscopic, you can’t see it with the naked eye, but there it is. As if it
were a wound. A wound that hasn’t healed up.
And, as with the growth rings of
fishes, terrible events stay on in our memory, mark our life, until they become
a measure of time. Happy days go fast, on the other hand – too fast – and we
forget them quickly.
What winter is for fish, loss is
for humans. Loss makes our time specific for us, the end of a relationship, the
death of a person we love.
Each loss a dark growth ring deep
down.
Our story is a family history recreated snippet by snippet,
it is wrapped up in a “mystery” when our writer, Kirmen Uribe, decides to
research why his grandfather’s shipping boat was called “Dos Amigos” (“Two
Friends”). Who is this mysterious friend of his grandfather’s who our writer
knows nothing about? So Kirmen travels, relives his memories, interviews family
friends and acquaintances, gives us snatches of truth to rebuild his
grandfather’s life and solve the mystery of the boat’s naming:
Dad was startled the day I took
up the atlas and a ballpoint pen and went in to him. It wasn’t long after he’d
retired from fishing.
I handed him the pen so he could
draw the exact route they used to take to Rockall. He looked leery, as if
another boat captain had asked him for one of his maritime secrets, the way to
some hidden fishing ground.
He did it at last: Pass France,
go up to St. George’s Channel and head northwest. That was the way to get to
Rockall.
As I watched his nervous hand
drawing, a strange sensation came over me. I understood that the mark Dad made
with the ballpoint pen would remain in the atlas forever.
But at the same time something
told me that he himself wasn’t going to be around forever, the mark in the book
was forever but Dad was not. I felt fear, a terror at losing my father.
A boat’s captain never shows his
navigational charts to anyone, when he goes ashore he rolls them up and takes
them home with him.
Death doesn’t show us its charts,
either.
As you can see it is a family tradition, a way of life,
fishermen for generations, except for Uribe (he’s a writer), the fishing boat
era has passed, made way for giant trawlers with fancy navigational gear,
unlike the history of the Uribe family simple fishermen who knew the places
where to catch the best fish, places where the waves are the largest on the planet,
so large scientists didn’t believe the Basques, later these experts would secede.
Besides the journey our writer makes to discover the tale of
his grandfather’s boat we learn about the Spanish Civil War, the propaganda films,
we learn about plane trips and people who journey to New York (other
passengers) and of course we learn of Uribe’s struggle to write the book we’re
reading, we celebrate language, we learn of our writer’s “fiction”:
It’s weird the way memory works,
how we remember in our own way, turning what at one time was presumably reality
into fiction. It works that way in families especially. To remember the people
who came before us, their stories get told, and from those anecdotes we know
what a person was like. Roles get assigned to us and people remember us
according to those roles.
This work is a celebration of life, of being from a small
Basque fishing village, a celebration of family, an homage to an era long lost
and a family connection. Through a raft of techniques Uribe slowly peels back
the story of his family, we have emails, we have references to films, time
elapses on the airplane screen, diaries of fourteen year old boys are
discovered and relayed to us, and we learn of our writer’s relationship with
his own step son.
Whilst in New York, Uribe visits a small museum that displays
the collection of Henry Clay Frick. This leads his mind to think about works of
art which display images in mirrors, he thinks of Diego Velazquez’s 1656 work “Las
Meninas”:
In Las Meninas the other side of a picture appears. The author himself
appears, Velazquez, painting a picture. What’s happening while the picture is
being painted appears. The king and queen stand posing and a number of people
are looking on. And in the background is the hazy image of that picture he will
paint, the king and queen in the mirror. Las
Meninas makes visible a picture’s insides and I reasoned that I had to tell
the story of what’s inside a novel. The interviews that get done, the work in
the archives, the research on the Internet. To put on display: all the doubts
entertained and the wrong roads taken. On display: how the author himself has
changed since beginning to write the novel.
And just as in Velazquez’s work
the image of the picture being painted appears hazy, in the novel too the
reader will only suspect what kind of novel the author is writing. The novel
itself will never appear per se. Nevertheless, one must not forget that what’s
most important in Las Meninas are the
meninas, the young ladies-in-waiting,
and not the royal couple. And not Velazquez himself. And in my novel too what’s
most important will not be that still-unwritten novel, what’s most important
isn’t the writer, but the flight itself. I mean, the movement is the most
important thing, the process that leads to writer to write the novel.
Slightly reminiscent of, “The Life of Rebecca Jones” by
Angharad Price, but with a lot more celebration of fiction and the art of
writing is contained here. Finally this is a lament on the closed world of
Basque literature, their “literary tradition” is “small, poor, disorderly. But
the worst thing is it being a secret.” Thanks to Seren Discoveries (via Seren
Books) for inviting me into the Basque house so that some of the secrets can be
shared.
My copy was courtesy of the publisher (as you may not know
if I receive a review copy of a book and I totally dislike the work, I actually
don’t review it, if I pay I can be scathing, if it’s free I’d rather not be compromised
by revealing my true thoughts – no fear with this one though, I thoroughly
enjoyed it).
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