On a transatlantic flight between Bilbao and New York City, a
fictional version of Kirmen Uribe recalls three generations of
family history-the inspiration for the novel he wants to write-and
ponders how the sea has shaped their stories. The day he knew he
was going to die, our narrator's grandfather took his
daughter-in-law to the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, the de facto
capital of the Basque region of northern Spain, to show her a
painting with ties to their family. Years later, her son Kirmen
traces those ties back through the decades, knotting together
moments from early twentieth-century art history with the stories
of his ancestors' fishing adventures-and tragedies-in the North
Atlantic Ocean. Elegant, fluid storytelling is punctuated by scenes
from Kirmen's flight, from security line to airport bar to jet
cabin, and reflections on the creative writing process. This
original and compelling novel earned debut author Kirmen Uribe the
prestigious National Prize for Literature in Spain in 2009.
Exquisitely translated from Basque to English by Elizabeth Macklin,
Bilbao-New York-Bilbao skillfully captures the intersections of
many journeys: past and present, physical and artistic, complete
and still unfolding. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao is the second book
commissioned for the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna
Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate
space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec's An
Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are
pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of
tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked,
noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such
intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre,
moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to
eating, drinking, and dreaming.
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