By Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Graywolf Press, 338 pages

Spanish Basque novelist Bernardo Atxaga was new to Reno, but he soon found out what makes its trees tremble.

Atxaga’s intriguing new novel, ,is a marvelous mélange that combines interwoven time- and storylines with journal-like entries, fiction, and memoir to create a literary effect at once entertaining and disturbing. The book is set during his nine-month stay as a writer-in-residence at the University of Nevada’s Center for Basque Studies, a place in which Atxaga is a stranger in a strange land — and what he experiences is stranger still.

From the almost unnerving silence of the city to the glowing eyes of a backyard raccoon that greets the author’s family on their first night in a rented house near campus, the tension in the air gives even mundane events a sense of resignation and foreboding. But when violence does happen — a series of rapes and the kidnapping and murder of a young coed — the community reaction is almost one of allAmerican malaise. Violent acts against women that ought to have caused an immediate public response are met almost with indifference. Are Americans, the author seems to wonder, so accustomed to violence that the serial violation of the defenseless is somehow accepted as part of daily life?

As the journal entries accumulate, they recount not only the awful understatement of the coverage of developments in the criminal investigation but also the anecdotes and oddities that illustrate the author’s almost alien residency. Dry humor and irony make their cameos. On the family’s first stroll near their rented house, a “helicopter flew overhead, very low, signalling its position with a flashing red light. It passed over the highway and landed on the roof of St. Mary’s, the hospital we had unsuccessfully requested to be added to our health insurance, only to find that it was too expensive for our coverage plan.”