A dislocated Basque writer living temporarily in Reno during a troubling time — this is the stuff of Nevada Days, a compelling new mix of fiction and memoir
Bernardo Atxaga’s Nevada Days is something of a hybrid, not unlike the state where it is set. Built out of the author’s experience, during the 2007-2008 academic year, as a writer-in-residence at UNR, the book falls into the amorphous territory of autofiction or life writing, which walks a line between fiction and nonfiction, novel and personal narrative. Atxaga is well-suited to navigate such an amorphous landscape; a Spanish Basque writer, he understands what it means both to belong and to be displaced. Even the name he uses reflects this state of bifurcation — he was born Joseba Irazu Garmendia in 1951.
The role of the writer-in-residence is, of course, bifurcated by its nature; one is always a fish out of water in that role. This is, to some extent, the point of the enterprise, to jar the writer out of his or her comfort zone, and in so doing, encourage seeing the world anew. It is also an unlikely subject for a novel; I don’t know that I’ve seen it done before. It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse; as someone who’s participated in residencies (in fact, I read Nevada Days while doing so), I’ve wondered more than once about keeping a kind of daybook, although I have never followed through. Something about the lack of distance, perhaps, the pressure of writing about an experience as you are living through it, keeps getting in the way. Yes, I agree that writers are “recording entities,” to steal a phrase from William Burroughs, but I prefer my recording through a double lens. Past and present, observation and reflection, this represents another bifurcation, the kind on which autobiographical narrative depends.
Atxaga, however, has solved this problem deftly through the intersection of, yes, fiction — blurring the line between the actual and the imagined. As he writes in the early pages, after encountering a rattlesnake on the seat of a car, “Earle failed to pin the snake down properly and as he was picking it up, he managed to drop it onto the roof of the van. Then it slithered toward me, fixing me with its two black eyes … No, that only happened in my head. Earle playfully scolded the snake, saying that the driver’s seat was only for drivers, not mouse-hunters. The snake hung limply from the forked pole, like a belt.”
This back-and-forth between outer and inner, Atxaga as character and also author, deepens as we read Nevada Days. In a certain sense, it is very much a daybook, recording the subtle demarcations by which one makes (or tries to make) an alien landscape home. Atxaga, who has come to Reno with his wife and two daughters, recounts the process of acclimatization, getting settled in a small house, enrolling his kids at school. The girls are fascinated by a raccoon that lives in the backyard, “two points, two small yellow holes, two shining eyes. They did not move or blink, inhuman in their fixity.” Atxaga is more intrigued by the desert — which is always just below, or above, the surface. “As Daniel Sada might have said,” he notes, “reality was the desert, and representation of reality the stage set.”
It’s a telling observation, reminiscent of Brecht on Los Angeles: “Scratch the surface a little and the desert shows through.” But it resonates here in another way because it also describes Atxaga’s emotional terrain. For him, the desert — or more generally his own state of displacement — creates a kind of psychic blank slate, on which memories and reveries emerge from the stuff of daily life. A photograph of the Basque boxer Paulino Uzcudun, who fought Max Baer in Reno in 1931, leads Atxaga to visit his former training camp in Steamboat Springs, then gives way to three long reveries about the fighter’s life. The effect is of someone peeling back the surface, not of reality so much as of narrative, showing us a place less to describe it than to evoke the way it feels.
“Most human beings,” Atxaga insists, “leave behind them only a name and a few facts.” His book, then, is an attempt to uncover and connect these dots. That he can’t do it, or can do it only on the most subjective level, is the point entirely; we are always looking to make patterns out of the fragments, especially in a place we do not know. “I, too, wanted to enter the real world,” he admits. “… Once around, twice, three times, four times, and so on until the carousel stopped. But where was the centre? Where was the axis around which everything was turning?”
Such questions grow more complex after a 19-year-old named Brianna Denison is abducted (she is later found to have been raped and murdered) from a house in Atxaga’s neighborhood. Suddenly, everything is not just odd but sinister. “It snowed in Reno,” he reports, “on the three days after the kidnapping, on January 20, 21, and 22. Every flake that fell was like a word, always the same word, the one we heard everywhere: Rape! Rape! Rape! … One morning, I noticed raccoon tracks on the snow covering the garden porch, and for a few hours, until Angela calmed me down, I was gripped by the absurd belief that our raccoon had turned rabid. I wondered, too, how we would defend ourselves if the criminal attacked at night.”
On the one hand, this is a projection. As the father of two young girls, Atxaga can’t help but see the tragedy on personal terms. On the other, it creates a different sort of subtext, a ripple in the fabric of routine. As a visitor, a stranger in a strange land, Atxaga looks for custom where he can find it; his narrative is marked by vacation trips (San Francisco, Las Vegas) and holidays with new friends and acquaintances, a kind of proxy family. “We were very glad to be back in our house on College Drive after that three-thousand-mile journey,” he reflects after returning from a long drive through the Southwest. “If, as Eric Havelock writes in his book The Muse Learns to Write, all life’s pleasures are related to rhythm, we were really pleased to return to the rhythm of our Reno routine.”
Here it is, one more bifurcation, distance and proximity again. It’s not just that, by this point, Atxaga has been in Reno long enough to become a quasi-resident; it’s also the dislocation of his fear. “The dark side of Reno life continued,” he acknowledges, when a friend reminds him that “it’s nearly two months since (the culprit) killed Brianna. He’s probably already preparing to commit another murder.” Belonging and unbelonging, comfort and unease. Even without the threat of the killer, he is somewhere in between.
Again, this has to do with his status as a visiting writer, in Reno as a resident but only temporarily. For him, there is no closure, really; he is always only passing through. Atxaga makes this explicit by ending Nevada Days with a collection of news clips, in which he reveals, among other details, the arrest and conviction of a 27-year-old Reno resident for the killing of Brianna Denison. The touch is just right, almost an afterthought — not least because the crime ceases to matter to the author or his family at the very instant they leave town. As long as they remain in Reno, it is their center. They are part of the community. Their participation, though, is temporary. They know they will soon be gone.
As a result, the experience of being in Reno is less lived, exactly, than it is remembered: Even as it happens, it has the texture of a dream. Atxaga understands this, which is one reason he toggles back and forth between daily life and memory, as a strategy for framing the middle ground, where he finds himself. “We leave behind whatever happens to us,” he writes, “but our way of living changes.” This sounds like a code for living to me. It’s fitting that such a reflection comes in a sequence devoted to his mother’s funeral, which takes place in Spain after his return from Reno; her deterioration plays a subtle but important role in the narrative.
What Atxaga is getting at, once more, is memory, which is the fabric out of which we stitch ourselves. What happens when it evaporates? What happens when we move on from where and who we were? Such questions are not exceptional. On the contrary, they are fundamental to every one of us. In the act of disruption, however, of moving somewhere for a fixed duration, Atxaga has opened an unlikely universal lens. Disruption, after all, is the nature of existence. There is never anything that we can hold. Experiences become memories and then evaporate. Everything is here to disappear. “We always return to our everyday life,” Atxaga reminds us; “we have nowhere else to go.”
Nevada Days
By Bernardo Atxaga
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
Graywolf, $16