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Basque Studies Program Newsletter · Issue
52, 1995
For the Bookshelf
by William A.
Douglass
Two works of popular fiction regarding Basques are
worth considering for your bookshelf. Helen Forrester’s
The Liverpool Basque (London, New York, Sydney,
Toronto: BCA, 1993) regards the little-known world of the
small Basque colony in Liverpool, England. As a major
European seaport, Liverpool attracted Basque mariners as
well as serving as a transit port of call for some Basque
emigrants on their way to the New World. Canadian novelist
Helen Forrester is also the author of nonfiction works on
Liverpool so her street scenes and sense of the city’s
history are well-informed. The novel also benefits from her
personal relationship with Vicente Elordieta, the son of a
Liverpool Basque hotelkeeper, whose establishment was a way
station for many a Basque emigrant. In short, while a novel,
The Liverpool Basque has a special authenticity which
borders on the ethnographic. The only weakness is its
treatment of the Spanish Civil War and the Basque resistance
to Franco, which is erroneous in some respects. However,
neither is central to the theme of the
book.
High Desert Malice by Kirk Mitchell (Avon
Books) is the story of Dominica Laguerre’s struggles in
central Nevada as a Bureau of Land Management ranger. Of
French Basque descent, Dee Laguerre went to school with the
local madam and herself lives in a Basque hotel. She spends
her free evenings trying to track down ranchers whose
solution to the concern with overgrazing is to illegally
kill the wild mustangs. This is a murder mystery in which
Dee confronts ranchers, miners, alfalfa farmers and
eco-terrorists while attempting to protect the delicate
desert lands that she loves.
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