FICTION

OBABAKOAK by Bernardo Atxaga (Pantheon: $22; 326 pp.). Obaba is not a real place, but the imaginary home of the characters who people this sprawling, sweet and eccentric novel by Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga. The author likes to talk about the Game of the Goose, a game of 63 squares, as a metaphor for life, in which chance and free will affect the outcome in equal measure, and a methodical plodding from goose-square to goose-square is the best guarantee of progress. He juggles a rather remarkable assortment of characters. There is the man who is terrified of a childhood story about lizards who crawled into people’s ears and made them idiots, whose suspicions that a lizard-loving friend harmed another in that exact fashion leads him to a dreadful, and awfully funny, end. There is the teen-age boy who writes love letters and learns years later that the replies were drafted by his father, eager to guide his son in the proper ways of romance. Atxaga is clever without ever being superficial; there is poignancy in his nimble prose.