Books sometimes fall into your hands in the oddest ways.  Meeting up with a particular work of literature may have an eeriness of occasion that resembles an accident that is not really accidental.  Bernardo Atxaga’s novel Obabakoak, for instance, was recommended to me late one night in a Barcelona restaurant after much conversation and a great deal of wine.  I wrote down this curious title on a sodden piece of paper and put it into my wallet.  For the next month, every time I tried to get out some dollar bills or a picture ID, my note with the stuttering cryptic word “Obabakoak” printed on it would drop out and fall to the floor.  Time and again, I would pick it up and put it back into my wallet.  Time and again, the piece of paper, still smelling of wine, would reappear.  After some hunting on the web—the book is out of print in the United States—I finally obtained a copy, and soon after I did, the piece of paper obligingly disappeared from my wallet.
    Obabakoak is a wonderfully peculiar novel.  Written originally in the Basque language and published in 1988, then translated into Spanish by the author and subsequently translated from its Spanish version into English by Margaret Jull Acosta and published in this country by Pantheon in 1992, it was yanked out of print a few years later.  Such was the obstacle course in the American literary marketplace for a book whose specialty is a kind of intimate, wry muttering.  (One of its chapter headings is titled, “How to Plagiarize.”)   Early on in Obabakoak—the title refers to the goings-on in the Basque village of Obaba—we are introduced to a character named Esteban Werfell.  At the same time and in the same paragraph we are also introduced to the library where he writes.  Esteban is a literary type, and he surrounded on all four walls by about twelve thousand leather-bound volumes, some of them his own purchases and some of them his father’s.
    In this room, among all these books, there is one window.

…a window through which, while he wrote, Esteban Werfell could see the sky, the willows, the lake and the little house built there for the swans in the city’s main park.  Without really impinging on his solitude, the window made an inroad into the darkness of the books and mitigated that other darkness which often creates phantoms in the hearts of men who have never quite learned how to live alone.

    Esteban’s inner life is singularly like the room in which he sits.  The parallelism is exact.  The scene includes two complementary darknesses, the first a non-metaphorical darkness and the second being “that other darkness,” the shadowy psychic world of Esteban Werfell’s self-imposed imaginative conditioning that he shares with other men “who have never quite learned how to live alone.”  This community defined by solitude invites a party of phantasms and should be familiar to most writers and readers as the locale of emotional and cognitive associations.  The literal window makes an “inroad” on the literal darkness, and its view of willows and lake and swan house constitute the prisoner’s portion, his meager diet of the real. (A recent Nobel Prize-winner in literature, Orhan Pamuk, claimed in his Nobel speech that such rooms are shared by all writers, everywhere.)
    Esteban’s room serves as that classic enclosure, the haunt of the imagination.  This site can be a mental or a physical place or both at once.  Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot lived there until she grew “half sick of shadows,” broke her mirror and became, in effect, a Victorian zombie sleepwalking her way to her watery death.  Honoré de Balzac apocryphally chained to his desk, Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room, Lord Chandos in his castle, Jorge Luis Borges in his library, Emily Dickinson behind her closed shutters, Plato’s inhabitants of the cave—all of them inhabit prisons where imagination is doomed to flourish.
    As an allegory of the world of appearances, Plato’s cave is also an enclosure of sorts where the receptive imagination is called upon to make some narrative sense of the shadows on the wall.  Plato’s cave is a libelous accusation against art itself.  Plato generally mistrusted art as the evil twin of philosophy and goes to great lengths to say so in Book Three of The Republic, but through a kind of indeliberate dramatic irony, art arises in Plato’s cave as comfort and compensation.  The world of appearances has a trapdoor that takes you into a counterworld of meaningful dreams.  Plato’s cave—I knew of a film society with this name, and, more recently, a tattoo parlor—was one of the first undergrounds devoted to visions.  Not entirely by accident, it resembles a theater.
    An image of the writerly mind walled up among books with one window looking fixedly outward: this is where Atxaga’s novel begins, and it is the model for the apparent division of the literal and the associational, the textual and the subtextual.  We are presented with a man and the staging area of his life, along with the imprisoning rewards of his bookish work.  Outside and inside, object and metaphor, are somehow reciprocal.  The picture of the object—what I’d call the pictorialism—leads by a circuitous route to the inner life.  In this passage the separation between the soul of the world and the body in which that soul is housed has melted away.
    This is like saying that the paintings that seem most like dreams—those by Giorgio de Chirico or René Magritte or Max Ernst, for example—also have a strange and seemingly unnecessary accumulation of detail, a chronic fixation in which it is dangerous to move in any direction.  Something has been frozen in place.
    Esteban’s library and this novel, Obabakoak, constitute both the blockade and the window, the dungeon and the escape route.  The room, after all, is not yet sealed up.  Light streams in through the glass like the light from a projectionist’s booth.  We can’t see the swans, but thanks to the reference to their shelter, they’re there by implication, as is much else in this novel.

From The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Copyright 2007 by Charles Baxter. All rights reserved.