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The Basque Hotel
The time is the 1930s and the setting is a western frontier town of a few thousand people, with one dubious distinction. Carson City, Nevada, is the smallest capital in the United States. Pete's world is circumscribed by Main Street - shops and stores, a pool hall, boarding-house hotels, and a capitol whose main contribution is as a place of liquid shade and precious green grass in blistering summers. By far the most important event of the day is when the steam whistle of the V & T sounds, signaling thee passage of the shortline railway on its journey from Virginia City to Reno, "that impossibly big town of 20,000 people 30 miles away." Pete's immigrant parents run the Basque Hotel, bed and meals, whiskey and wine in Prohibition time for sheepherders and town characters. Pete is indifferent to his heritage except for disquiet about his parents' ignorance of such American traditions as Christmas trees. The heroes that figure in the boy Pete's growing up consist of a motley collection as delightful as the reader will ever meet: Buckshot Dooney, the town drunk who "travels from trouble to trouble"; Hallelujah Bob, who pursues his demons with a shotgun when he has imbibed too much; Irish prospector Mickey McCluskey; Mizoo, the cowboy with a ten-gallon hat; Pansy Gifford, the handyman who always wears a suit with a flower in his lapel; and George Washington Lopez, who swamps out the local whorehouse a block away from the capitol. Pete, too prone to dreams, undergoes his rites of passage - cruelty and kindness, disillusionment, love and terror, pathos and hilarious adventure, and finally, a cautious understanding of his world.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of Nevada Press
- Publish Date: May 1st, 1993
- Pages: 136
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.02in - 6.04in - 0.50in - 0.53lb
- EAN: 9780874172164
- Categories: • Sagas• Literary
About the Author
Robert Laxalt graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1947. Laxalt joined the staff of the university in 1954, first as director of News and Publications and later as director of the University of Nevada Press, which he founded. He was named a Reynolds Distinguished Visiting Professor and held the position of Distinguished Nevada Author Chair. He is the author of seventeen books, including the critically acclaimed Sweet Promised Land. He lived in Washoe Valley until his death in 2001.
Praise for this book
"The brief chapters are beautifully written by an author who not only remembers youth, but can stir up long-dormant feelings in the reader . . . In simple and direct prose, Laxalt brings alive an entire town through the eyes of a young boy. It is both heartwarming and heartbreaking." --West Coast Review of Books
"Laxalt merits praise for realizing the true potential of regionalism--capturing the essence of time, place, and character, and universalizing it; making something of a mythic, eternal moment out of the past; taking the uniqueness of ethnicity and making it accessible to all readers, regardless of ethnic, cultural, or regional background." --The Bloomsbury Review
"This short, beautifully written, semiautobiographical novel is a small gem, a perfect example of a childhood tranquilly recollected . . . Laxalt is a rare find, a totally genuine, unaffected voice." --Publishers Weekly