Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt (review)

4 4 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 8 “of women destroyed or nearly destroyed, / women who surface in frightening forms I and wreak their stories on the shores” (63). To record our stories is to listen to the human, animal, and spiritual voices stirring beside us. “Recuerda ... from the Spanish recordar / which is at root not remember or re-mind, / / but pass back through the heart” (4). How long we last is determined by our fortitude to re-enter, little wounds and all. Sweet Prom ised Land. By Robert Laxalt. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007. 50th Anniversary Edition. 207 pages, $29.95/$ 18.00. Reviewed by David Rio University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz Fifty years after its first publication, Sweet Promised Land continues to be the most emblematic work of Robert Laxalt and the best literary testament to Basque immigration in the American West. Sweet Promised Land is the history of the immigration of Laxalt’s father, Dominique, into the United States and of his short return to his Basque homeland in the Pyrenees mountains with his son forty-seven years later. This classic book, already translated into four languages (German, French, Basque, and Spanish), has been described as an intimate biography and also as an affectionate memoir of a son to his father. As Ann Ronald points out in her insightful foreword, “the double texture of the tale adds breadth to Laxalt’s keen observations of Nevada and of Europe’s Basque Country and depth to his sense of family and community ties” (xi). A good por­ tion of the book’s success lies in the powerful interaction between Dominique’s stories about his life as a sheepherder in Nevada and the narrator’s impressions of their pilgrimage to the Basque Country, a trip that meant for Robert Laxalt his first direct contact with his roots. Another remarkable characteristic of Sweet Promised Land is its fluid style of prose, direct, concise, and free of pretension that is not incompatible with emotion and an engaging breath of lyricism. Laxalt also resorts to humor, allowing him a certain distance both from himself and from the protagonist of the memoir. Sweet Promised Land goes beyond the personal level to illustrate the expe­ rience of Basque immigrants in the American West, vindicating the figure of the Basque sheepherder. Laxalt’s book allowed Americans to “discover” the Basques, who until then had been just one more group of immigrants in America, often identified with one of the least prestigious economic activities in the West, sheepherding. In contrast to some earlier western popular novels (for example, those by H. S. Drago) where the Basques were often relegated to secondary and stereotyped roles, Sweet Promised Land presents the Basques as a distinct ethnic group, endowed with very specific traits of ethnic identity and capable of surviving the experience of immigration with sacrifice and dignity. b o o k R e v ie w s 4 4 9 Laxalt’s book is a powerful memoir of Basque settlers in the American West and a compelling tale of immigration, dealing with some of the most common features of migratory processes in general: the sadness and nostalgia due to leaving one’s native country, the struggle for acceptance, the difficulty or impossibility of returning, and the individual’s need for a sense of place and identity. Certainly, Dominique’s story personifies the history of many immigrants, for whom their adopted country gradually ceases to become a strange and hostile place and instead becomes the promised land. However, Laxalt’s book also stresses the high price paid by immigrants and their immediate descendants, “the sons of old country people everywhere [who] must fight a little harder and do something better with their lives” (60). Ultimately, place becomes for Laxalt the site of conflicted identity, a dialectic between the New World and the Old World, between the American West and the Basque Country. Bird of Another Heaven. By James D. Houston. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 352 pages, $34...