“Burning Bones” – Miren Agur Meabe (translated from Basque by Amaia Gabantxo)

Many thanks to @parthianbooks and @netgalley for an early copy!

“Burning Bones” forms part of a triptych of books revolving around loss and how this can fuel creativity, or at least what we can make out of loss. Though I haven’t read it, the novel “A Glass Eye” seems to be the first part of this, an auto-fiction about the writer moving to the French part of the Basque Country after a break-up and appears to be a fragmented tale of a middle-aged woman using writing to fill a gap.

This book is a companion piece to this and I imagine has quite a lot of overlap of characters and themes. It is certainly fragmented in both theme and style, its 21 pieces going from hallucinatory tales of rat extermination to harkenings back to childhood and past losses and errors. There are references to the violent recent past of the Basque Country, travels to America, journal entries, brief patches of poetry, longer patches of poetic prose – the author is clearly a writer of great skill and range, and themes that she covers are not explored by many writers, and fewer with this style.

Is this going to be an automatic recommendation from me? Not quite. I think I missed a lot having not read “A Glass Eye”, and the very nature of the book will put people off – there was no clear line through the book, and I did find myself switching off at points. Nonetheless, I think many of you like more experimental structures and ideas, so this should be one that you keep an eye out for. If nothing else, it’s great to see more minority language literature being translated into English, and I hope to see more Basque books appear in translation in the future.