The past life of dolphins
2021According to an old Basque legend, dolphins, in a previous life, were humans. They became dolphins by loving mermaids. By taking that step, their life changed completely. The lives of migrants also change when they start a new life in another country. The Previous Life of Dolphins intertwines three different story lines following a non-conventional narrative form: Kirmen Uribe’s research at the New York Public Library about the life of suffragette Rosika Schwimmer, the life of his own family in New York during 2018 and 2021 (with the background of the stormy end of Trump’s presidency and the pandemic); and, the reminiscences of the past, a past linked to a small coastal town in the Basque country where the writer grew up with a group of revolutionary women. The Past Life of Dolphins is Kirmen Uribe’s most ambitious novel to date, the most humane, expansive and luminous, and one that keeps defining the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, and the novel as a form.
Spanish Critis Award
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There are letters, memories, newspaper articles, dialogues, childhood dreams, Basque myths, poems and songs, all kinds of textual forms that the writer integrates into his work without impeding its flow. On the contrary, "The Previous Life of the Dolphins" reads so easily and poetically that, despite all the catastrophes that break out in this novel, Uribe's indestructible optimism always shines through.