Bilbao-New York-Bilbao

Bilbao-New York-Bilbao

Elkar, 2008

In 2009, Uribe won the National Prize of Literature in Spain for his novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, a very original work that was received as a literary event in Spain. The critics have highlighted its capacity for finding new narrative forms within fiction without losing authenticity and communication with the reader.

The novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is set on a hypothetical flight that its narrator, one Kirmen Uribe, takes from Bilbao’s Loiu Airport to New York’s J.F.K. On the flight the writer contemplates his supposed novel-in-progress, which is about three generations of a family, his own, whose life is bound up with the sea. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is a novel with no conventional plot to speak of. Its structure is that of a net, and the knots of the net are the stories of the three generations as they intersect with crosswise stories and reflections on the twentieth century and on the art of writing.

Ollie Brock wrote about the novel in The Times Literary Supplement in August 2011: “Uribe has succeeded in realizing what is surely an ambition for many writers: a book that combines family, romances and literature, anchored deeply in a spoken culture but also in bookishness —and all without a single note of self-congratulation”.

The languages in which the novel has been contracted already exceeds twelve, including French (Gallimard) and Japanese (Hakusui Sha).

“One of the  best novels of 2010”. —Qué leer.

“One of the best novels translated into Japanese in 2012″—Vogue Japan.

“A splendid novel, which the reader acknowledges like a hug”. —El País

“Beautiful. It has the rare quality of attending to tradition without sounding like folk, and being modern without rejecting those that were so before”.
—ABC

The novel is set in a absolutely modern territory, usual place of key writers of our time as Emmanuel Carrere, WG Sebald, Orhan Pamuk and JM Coetzee, –Sudouest.

This book is as beautiful as a memory, –Le Figaró.

“Uribe’s literary proposal is entirely fresh and innovative. A novel of our time. This writer who comes from a “small country” begins its journey through the field of universal literature, searching for transnational communication. ”

Mitsuyoshi Numano, Mainichi Shimbun.