Michael Powers received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston in 2008. He grew up in Connecticut and upstate New York and currently lives in Houston, Texas. For a Mere Mortal to Tell the Truth           Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son Michael Powers           Bernardo Atxaga, The Accordionist’s Son.                Graywolf Press, 2009. Hardcover, 370 pp, $25.00.        Toward the end of Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” Jack, the narrator, has a confrontation with his mother, who’s just split up with his father. She tells him that events in her life, when she looks back on them even from a short distance, seem foreign to her, as if she’d read them in a work of fiction. She asks him if this seems strange to him. Speaking in retrospect, Jack says “It did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference is between what had happened and what hadn’t, and I knew I always would be.” And in just the space of this sentence the past is tied to the present, to the moment from which the story is being told, and the narrator takes a stand with regard to the relationship of narrative to truth, a stand his present self may or may not share (is he really still so certain?), and a stand that Ford may or may not share.        Most of the text of Bernardo Atxaga’s novel, The Accordionist’s Son, takes the form of a memoir written by David Imaz, now a rancher living in California, about his childhood and young adulthood in the Basque village of Obaba. But much of the most crucial information about this life is supplied outside the text of the memoir by David’s writer friend Joseba, whom David entrusts with the memoir and the literary material of his life, knowing he may die soon from heart disease. Toward the end of the memoir, as a way of staking his claim to the story and to the act of story-telling, David recalls a conversation between Joseba and a fellow prisoner that took place in the seventies, when David and Joseba were both imprisoned in Spain. In the conversation, the other prisoner asks Joseba why he writes stories:              “It’s a way of telling the truth,” Joseba answered. The              prisoner wasn’t convinced. “I think the best way is to              be straight with people,” he said. Joseba laughed and              patted him on the back: “Verily I say unto thee, it is              easier for a prisoner to pass through the eye of a keyhole              and escape than it is for a mere mortal to tell the truth or,              as you put it, be straight with people.” More than anything else, The Accordionist’s Son is about the efforts of these two men to arrive at the truth—about themselves and about their country—through narrative. For David the struggle is lifelong. Both he and Joseba are members of the generation whose parents fought the Spanish Civil War, and the scars of this conflict are everywhere in Obaba. Nothing is more important to David as a teenager than finding out whether the rumors he’s heard about his father, Angel, are true—that he got his wealth by working with the Spanish fascists, or that he was partly responsible for the numerous political executions that took place in the village. Angel himself mostly stalks around the edges of the narrative, a distant and insensitive father whose main concern for his son is that he should follow in his footsteps and be an accordionist. David, meanwhile, tries to put together the story of his father’s role in the war, vaguely aware that his own self-image depends on it.        By the time he comes back to the village from university, David doesn’t think much about his father anymore. He’s becoming engaged in a political struggle that’s gone on long past the end of the war. David’s story ends as he’s pulled out of bed—where he’s been lying with Virginia, a woman he’s loved  since childhood—in order to rescue four of his friends who are being pursued by the Spanish Civil Guard. In Obaba—unlike California—the personal is inseparable from the political.        I think some of my frustration with the book stems from the promise contained in Joseba’s statement to his fellow prisoner: that there will be an investigation into how the invention of narrative can provide access to kinds of truth that might be inaccessible otherwise, or into what the word truth can possibly mean in this context. It’s a promise the novel brings up constantly in the last hundred pages or so, but never really keeps. David never clues us in, never lets us know where the ruptures are between the facts as he remembers them and the story he’s telling. David’s father, for example, cannot be only what he appears to be in the story David tells—a fascist, a political murderer, a boor—but David never acknowledges or searches for a more complicated father, one who might have more secrets than the ones he’s managed to uncover. Joseba does acknowledge the ruptures in his own stories, which are at least nominally fictional, but the ruptures he acknowledges are not particularly informative. At a book club meeting in California, he reads a story in which a character who shares his name throws himself against a wall in a Spanish prison in order to hurt himself so he will appear to have been tortured, and in the process acquires a scar on his face. David lets us know later how this detail diverges from reality:                          Then Helen mentioned yesterday’s reading. “Everyone              was staring at your forehead. They were surprised not to see              a scar there,” she said to Joseba.                   “I do have a tendency to the autobiographical, but I don’t              go that far,” replied Joseba.                  But his tendency to the autobiographical does go that far.              The scar exists, not on his forehead, but on the back of his              neck. When he threw himself against the iron door, he didn’t              do so headfirst, as in his story, but backward. The doctors said              that if he’d hit himself only slightly harder he wouldn’t have              lived to tell the tale. What is the purpose of this change? We never really get a clear idea. In Atxaga’s internal fictions, what didn’t happen is only trivially different from what did happen. He wants to create fictional characters who have the power to fictionalize their own lives, but he doesn’t really give them this power. Neither David nor Joseba seems capable of inventing a meaningful fiction, and the result is that, like other, less self-aware narrators, they just tell us what happened.        To the extent to which the novel wants to talk about the relationship between narrative and reality, I think it fails. But I’m not sure how much it really wants to do that. My sense is that Atxaga is making certain contemporary novelist moves here—acknowledging artifice because, in our postmodern era, that’s what you have to do—but that once the artifice is acknowledged, he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. So what we’re left with is a pretty conventional novel with some stray odds and ends of theory attached to it. Which is too bad because, leaving aside its unfulfilled intentions, this is also a pretty gorgeous novel about the disappearing boundary between self and country, and about personal relationships between lovers and friends that finally, and despite all reasonable expectations, outlast everything else.        At the end of David’s story he pauses at his writing desk in California to take out a box of playing cards depicting butterflies from his home country. Listing their names and describing them, he assigns each as the representative of one of the people from his past—Ubanbe, the village boy who became a famous boxer; Teresa, who loved David and who, in order to punish him for neglecting her, clued him in to his father’s role in the executions; Lubis, David’s closest childhood friend, who as a young man was tortured and killed by the Civil Guard. It’s a cathartic process, in a way that perhaps writing the memoir hasn’t been:                    The fourth: Eudia pavonia. It’s a moth, and a mixture              of gold, blue, and gray, with two black lines on the hind              wings. It has four spots, like real eyes. I thought of you,              Teresa.                    Lymantria dispar is white and pink. It’s forewings look              as if they’d been painted by someone, it’s hind wings are              like two small skirts. I think of my mother.                   The eighth card has fallen face down, and I’ve left it like              that. I said to myself: “That’s Joseba. I don’t yet know which              card suits him.” He may well think the same about me.                   The ninth: Plebejus icarus. Small and blue. Lubis.        It’s the closest thing we get to what Joseba insists on in prison—an imaginative process that generates its own kind of truth, or that expresses truths about these characters that may not be accessible in any other way. The description of Lubis as a butterfly contains much of what we know about Lubis, his quietness and vulnerability, but also the immense tenderness and grief with which the writer, David, regards him.        David’s memoir is a record of its production—it is David’s effort to understand his life. I think Atxaga’s novel doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which any attempt to produce a single unified narrative out of the material of a life must leave things out and obscure and transform people and events because lives don’t really amount to unified narratives. But the effort and the record of it are powerful nonetheless—David’s struggle to understand a youth that’s deeply entangled in a complicated world, his pleasure much later at having found a more stable existence, and the love he feels toward all these people in his life, past and present. We hope he can find a story that satisfies him, at least, even if it isn’t quite enough for us.