Martutene is the eighth novel by Basque writer Ramon Saizarbitoria...creates, in his winding exploration of contemporary Basque society, a novel as large as the stately old mansion at its center, with room enough to house his wide-ranging intellectual interests: Literature, music, painting, medical ethics and sociology, history, and translation ...an incredible opportunity to understand Basque identity and culture on a deeper level, from the perspective of some of its insiders, with a gorgeous level of nuance...legacy of the Spanish Civil War and of ETA reverberate throughout the book in the most fascinating ways, perhaps even more so for an outsider who couldn’t hope to imagine the myriad emotional and psychological consequences of so much violence...its eight hundred pages, the rich and even exciting plotlines feel as if they unfold slowly, surrounded as they are by so much other material, but that is also one of the book’s pleasures and surely why others are predicting it will be a classic.
Invoking a mystique of the real in the tradition of Another Country, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Ulysses, Ramon Saizarbitoria has written a contemporary novel of ideas depicting everyday life in the Basque Country ...a constellation of relationships takes shape among a cluster of persons residing in the Martutene district of Do-nostia (San Sebastián)...couples at the center of the book personify contrasting sides of human nature — Martin and Julia represent the artistic, Abaitua and Pilar the scientific — at the confluence of multiple currents of Basque life: culture, love, politics, law, religion, government, medicine, business, economics, history, geography, and language meet in the two relationships as they change over Martutene’s eight hundred pages ... The people of Martutene become as real to us as their stories are to them ...translator Aritz Branton performs a valuable service by providing broader access to an essential work of Basque literature.
A grand and audacious novel, Martutene is just over 800 pages and presents a nuanced perspective of the contemporary Basque experience. History, politics, language, and culture ripple through the characters’ daily interactions. Saizarbitoria dramatizes the best and worst of the contemporary Basque experience — national pride and cultural intolerance, as well as gastronomy and terrorism ... Set in Martutene, a neighborhood in the city of Donostia (San Sebastián), the book centers on two couples struggling to maintain their relationships ...use of parallelism, repetition, and commentary creates a sense of self-awareness within the reader that the text is indirectly commenting on itself ...embedded stories are structured in a way that allows for the manifestations of themes ...relies heavily on narration and the omniscient third-person point of view ... Martutene is very much about beliefs, perceptions, feelings, memories, and the associations of its characters.
On paper, this book’s plot seems easy to describe, albeit fairly static: it follows the lives of two middle-aged couples ?— ?Martin and Julia, Abaitua and Pilar ?—? as they go about their daily lives and begin to question the bonds between them. This is somewhat accelerated by the arrival of Lynn, an American, whose life intersects with both couples in interesting ways ...the struggle for Basque independence looms in many of these characters’ histories contorts the narrative in unexpected ways ...alternates between the two couples from chapter to chapter, and doesn’t provide a lot of exposition up front, instead revealing information gradually... Action and contemplation frequently take center stage, but actions read about, imagined, or remembered also play a significant part in moving the novel’s plot forward ...Action and contemplation frequently take center stage, but actions read about, imagined, or remembered also play a significant part in moving the novel’s plot forward.
Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Martutene, hailed as the best novel ever written in Basque and now available in English translation, is, among other things, a moving reflection on loyalty and commitment ... His characters live in or around Martutene, a neighborhood southeast of the city of Donostia (San Sebastián), in Basque Country. Born into a culture and language that was once oppressed to near extinction, they have turned their relationship to Basqueness from a fate-imposed loyalty into a life-guiding personal commitment ... Saizarbitoria’s characters are struggling to adapt to a post-ETA world. Even if they disapproved of the violence, which all of them eventually did, it still gave meaning to their lives ... Ironically, the novel itself embodies that same globalizing passage — witness this English translation.
Martutene is a tony residential district outside of San Sebastian, Spain, one of the most important centers of the modern Basque world. There, live two couples who, not having much else to occupy their lives ever since Spain granted the region autonomy, more or less, have slid off into a kind of bored decadence ... Martin is a novelist...he lives in a kind of uneasy truce with Julia, a translator...Abaitua is a gynecologist...Pilar, a neurosurgeon, has grievances of her own ... Into this milieu falls Lynn, an American sociologist who inhabits their world just as a character named Lynn does the world of Max Frisch’s novel Montauk, which is quoted and alluded to throughout the long proceedings; life and art weave and tangle, and in the end Lynn is as much symbol as character. But symbol of what? Perhaps of an assertive, all-conquering global Americanism ... Saizarbitoria’s study of wobbly relationships is something of a Basque rejoinder to a Bergman film, for good or ill, glacially paced but rich in perception.
