Atxaga gives us an outsider’s clear look at American life during the pre-Great Recession, making even the mundane appear strange. He sheds light on the implicit violence of a country at war (albeit a distant one), and its society’s self-absorption and self-importance, adding another dimension to his novel. Though his account is unromanticized, it is not unforgiving. And though it focuses on America a decade ago, his insights still ring true, making the book as relevant as ever ... Nevada Days is not a light-hearted book, but there is still a warmth to it. As the novel illuminates the strange in American culture, it functions as a celebration of personal relationships and community, and of the interesting cast of characters Atxaga and his family meet in Reno. The appeal of the novel comes in the collage formed by all its juxtapositions, and in how capably the narrative jumps among topics and time periods, expertly evoking their atmospheres without any overshadowing the others.

Part of the thrill of Nevada Days is to marvel at a family’s ceaseless desire to explore America at a crossroads during the limited time they have ... For the Americans he will call his neighbors, colleagues, and friends during the next nine months, this silence is what we accept as reality, what we don’t protest: military helicopters as common as hawks in the sky, the anesthetizing bad news reaching us from Iraq and Afghanistan, health insurance too expensive to afford, biased documentaries and news programs that celebrate our military history, the business of incarcerating a large percentage of Americans, elementary schools running active-shooter drills, the economic exploitation of brown bodies, sexual assaults on college campuses, etc. Atxaga becomes the frog introduced late to the boiling pot in which the rest of us obliviously sit ... One assumes that the novel was a fascinating sort of travelogue for his Basque and Spanish readers—a report on America from one of their country’s most gifted storytellers. For Americans, though, in the five years since the novel’s publication, the chronicle of Atxaga and his family’s unflagging enthusiasm as they look for this thing called America may offer us something far more necessary—what the family discovers is the prologue to the country we find ourselves in today.

His genre-blurring Nevada Days neither loves nor scorns Reno so much as mulls it over slowly, deliberately ... Atxaga’s such an engaging witness ... I found refreshing Atxaga’s bemusement toward military ceremony. It’s honest. It’s thoughtful. It’s what our country desperately needs in this era of star-spangled pomp and fake patriots ... Nevada Days serves as an inverse retelling of that western classic, and through the precision of Atxaga’s language and the truths about Nevada and America he brings forth, it certainly meets the standard set by its predecessor.

There is not a traditional plot; rather, the book takes a diary form, and thoughts, observations, and memories bump into each other like buoys on the sea. 'I felt confused. Thoughts and memories kept getting mixed up in my head,' he says. Similar to the desolate Nevada landscape, often whatever Atxaga is trying to convey that is not in the present (his memories of his Basque childhood and fleeting thoughts) feels somewhat incomplete and removed, just out of the reader’s reach ... The most compelling element is the narrator’s relationship with Nevada. He says, 'Night was falling. In the sky, it was hard to tell blue from black.' The book’s structure is a series of vignettes or distilled moments explored rather than a continuous story. He says, 'The fluorescent light in the kitchen transformed the ingredients of the gin and tonic as he took them from the fridge: the little bottles of Schweppes sparkled; the ice cubes glittered like glass; the green of the gin bottle took on an emerald tone; the yellow of the lemons gleamed like wax.' ... Atxaga’s writing, 'the voices in [his] memory-stuffed head,' follows its own rhythms as it inhabits these various places in time. He is an outsider, on the perimeter, even in his memories. Readers will smell the pervasive sagebrush and feel the lurking danger of the Wild West, a place where footsteps quickly disappear in the dry air and always shifting sand.

Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga turns his attention toward the American West in Nevada Days, ... While Nevada is famous for its Basque immigrant community--and many U.S.-born writers who make pilgrimages to the European homeland--Nevada Days makes its mark by reversing this order. Atxaga is like a modern-day Tocqueville seeing the deserts of America, both physical and spiritual, with fresh insight ... The book walks a pleasant, meandering line between fiction and nonfiction. Most of it reads like a travel memoir, structured in short chronological entries, but the pages wander, loaded with tangential stories, intermittent dreams and stubborn memories.

Over 139 short sections, Nevada Days spans journal entries, news items, family memories and yarns imported from the Basque homeland. Without any surplus exoticism, Mr Atxaga records the strangeness, physical and social, of his desert berth: this primeval landscape where bare trapezoid mountains have 'nothing to do with us'. Pitiless nature feels 'remote and alien'. Poisonous spiders and rattlesnakes abound. On campus suspense builds as a spate of sexual assaults nearby ends with the abduction and murder of a student (a real case). Near and far, the prickle of threat and dread sharpens. Barack Obama, during his first candidacy, comes to town to denounce the war in Iraq.

Nevada Days is a quiet and profoundly singular portrait of Northern Nevada ... It’s a subdued book about place, rendering Nevada as its central subject ... If readers are looking for a clear plot and a dramatic arc, they’re likely to be disappointed. This is a book for readers looking for skillful writing with character and place very much at its center.

Vladimir Nabokov may have dismissed Reno as a 'dreary town,' but Basque novelist Atxaga profits from his nine-month stay there to produce this uncanny if occasionally desultory fictionalized travelogue ... Atxaga explores the sublime deserts and campy tourist attractions in a 'state that flourished thanks to... divorce, gambling, prostitution and mining for gold and silver.' ... Upon arriving, he catalogs his new environment’s dangers, the rattlers and black widows, instilling a sense of menace that intensifies when a string of unsolved sexual assaults occurs ... Ultimately, this discursive narrative full of fear, wonder, and detours rewards the patient traveler.

Writing in the form of a diary interspersed with longer personal essays, the narrator offers some fish-out-of-water descriptions of life in America: his kids doing active-shooter drills in school, campaign visits from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (the novel is set in 2007 and 2008), and (a particular fixation) the ignorance or blithe indifference of his neighbors to news about a serial rapist in the area ... From incident to incident, Atxaga’s storytelling can be engaging, shifting from highly detailed set pieces about funeral processions and typefaces to travelogues of road trips to San Francisco and through barren desert to dreamscapes (he depicts a particularly lively one involving a dumping ground for metaphors). But the novel overall is effectively plotless and hence static-feeling; despite Atxaga’s efforts to use the news stories about the rapist and disappeared adventurer Steve Fossett as a frame, the book mostly meanders.