Although writing about Nevada is in good hands these days, Atxaga reminds us that the right outsider can bring compelling insights.

Atxaga’s powers of observation are as keen as they are concise. He lets spare language do the work other stylists can only envy. When he allows us inside his thought process, as in a stirring entry titled “The Woman Who Read :A Reflection on People from Poor Places,” it is easy to see why he’s gaining an audience far outside Spain’s Basque region. “People who spend their lives in poor places died unknown to the world or, even sadder, unknown to themselves,” he writes. “How could they know themselves, when there was no midwife, no school to help them find out what it was they carried within them, in their blood, in their DNA; what lay latent in their mind, their temperament, waiting for something to bring it to the surface. They lived their lives, of course, but it was a life lived all on one level, reduced to the basics, to the elemental. Then, when they died, they were forgotten.”

If the journal entries offer a laconic tale of modern Reno, and by extension life in the real American West, Atxaga’s overlay of memoir and fiction are reminders that a virtuoso storyteller, a Basque Saroyan, is at work. “The Fighter: The Story of Paulino Uzcudun’s Father” captures the essence of fisticuffs in Basque culture and, yes, there’s a historic connection to Reno. In another scene, a telephone call to Axtaga’s mother takes on what feels like a universal feeling shared by grown children and aging parents. Seldom has silence on the line been imbued with so much meaning.

Although writing about the state is in good hands these days, thanks to the promising literary offerings of a new generation of authors (including Gabriel Urza and Claire Vaye Watkins, among many), Atxaga reminds us that the right outsider can bring compelling insights.

If Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who was actually born in Maine, captured the essence of 1940s Reno in his celebrated a persuasive argument can be made that Atxaga has caught the strange, beautiful, and troubled spirit of the place during the first years of the new century.

— John L. Smith