AUTHOR: Anjel Lertxundi
PUBLISHER: Alberdania
GENRE: General Fiction
READER’S NAME: Danielle Maxson
 

In recent years, school shootings and mass shootings have dominated public discourse in the United States. Their apparent increase has been called by some a rise in domestic terrorism. Against this sense of a growing threat to public life, Anjel Lertxundi’s novel Felicidad perfecta (Perfect Happiness) seems particularly attuned to the present-day concerns of the American people.

Centered around a girl who witnesses an assassination by a member of ETA, the armed Basque separatist group that was active in Spain from the 1960s until recent years, the novel could provide a touchstone for reflection on the psychological and moral impact pubic shootings may have on individual lives.

The main character, a nameless teenager aspiring to a career in piano performance, narrates her own story, which begins at her piano school. After a disappointing session with her teacher, who criticizes her lackluster playing, a decision to take an alternate route home leads the girl to a nearby beach.

There, she sees a man shot without warning; as he falls to the ground, his eyes meet hers, and in her shock at what she is witnessing the girl closes her eyes and does not see the shooter. She also fails to process the appearance of a photographer, whose photo of her next to the victim will appear the next morning on the front page of the city newspaper.

The story then winds through the next 24 hours, describing the protagonist’s reaction to what she witnessed, her parents’ concern for her well-being and their hopes to erase the event from her mind and keep it from the collective knowledge of the town. These hopes are dashed when their daughter’s face appears in the paper the next day. In a scene that helps to define the moral thrust of the story, the girl’s father takes her to visit the newspaper’s publisher, who defends their use of her photograph on legal grounds.

The father counters with a moral argument, asserting that they used her image – and by extension her fear, her shock, and her inability to respond to the horror she witnessed – not to elucidate the event but merely to sell more papers. Failing to extract an apology, father and daughter leave, speaking briefly with a young acquaintance who has been working at the paper. His pride in becoming a journalist and an almost flippant mention of the girl’s appearance on the front page paint him as already morally impoverished by the work he is learning to do.

As the plot progresses, the girl learns the dead man’s name and is told that his assassination was a mistake; the intended target was not present and is safe. Her struggles to process this information and the entire situation are interleaved with her progress in her musical pursuits and descriptions of her life 14 years later, when she learns the assassin has been released from prison. By the last page, she has begun to feel that the events of this 24-hour period have already been erased by the routines of daily life.

Felicidad perfecta is an introspective text, focusing on the main character’s internal monologue as she lives through the events of this one horrific day. Through her eyes, we see a young girl’s reaction to an incomprehensible act of violence and her family’s attempts to protect her from repercussions, particularly from the notoriety of being recognized as a witness.

She also ponders the media’s use of its power to tell or suppress a story, the ethics of journalism, and the development of her own career and vocation as a musician. The story includes details that hint at its setting in northern Spain, but these details should cause a translator little trouble. The entirety of the book seems well-suited to translation into English, both linguistically and thematically.
Author Anjel Lertxundi’s wide-ranging career spans writing, journalism, literary criticism, and screenwriting. Honors include Spain’s National Essay Award, the Basque Literature Award, and the Critics’ Award for Narrative in the Basque language. His writing, which has been translated mainly into Spanish with some works translated into other languages, provides a unique perspective on the Basque experience in modern-day Spain.

It is important to note that Lertxundi writes his novels in Euskera, the language of the Basque people. This edition of Felicidad perfecta is a translation from Basque into Spanish and would therefore serve as a “bridge” text for translation into English. Although a Basque-to-English translation does exist, the book was released as part of a series on Basque Studies and is largely unknown to the American public. A new translation by a major publishing house could offer greater exposure, establish Lertxundi as an author of note in American literary circles, and position the novel as a valuable addition to the national conversation on gun violence in public spaces.