Latest Review: "Plants Don't Drink Coffee" by Unai Elorriaga

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Unai Elorriaga’s Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, which was translated from the Basque by Amaia Gabantxo and published by Archipelago earlier this year.

Elorriaga is one of only a handful (or maybe only two?) contemporary Basque authors to have his work translated and published in English. (To put this is a weird, unhelpful context, over the past three years, more contemporary Basque works have been published in the U.S. than works of contemporary Hindi writers.) He’s a relatively young author—his first novel, Sprako Tranbia (A Tram to SP), was published in 2002 and won the prestigious Spanish Premio National de Narrativa—so hopefully he’ll have a long career in translation.

Larissa’s reviewed a number of books for us in the past. She also reviews for L Magazine, is working towards her Master’s in Library Science, and is studying Danish.

Here’s the opening to her piece:

Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, Basque author Unai Elorriaga’s first novel to be translated into English, spins four intersecting tales about the magic of everyday life. Narrated by Tomas, an earnest young boy and several other members of his sweetly eccentric family—including a rugby-obsessed uncle and a talkative teenage cousin with a flair for entomology—Elorriaga’s fanciful narrative captures the slight, quotidian dramas of small town life and imbues them with the clear-eyed wonder of a fairytale.

With his father seriously ill in the hospital, Tomas finds himself spending most of his summer days at his aunt’s home, helping his cousin Iñes collect insects for a class project. But one particular specimen eludes the pair, no matter how many ladybugs and beetles and grasshoppers they catch. The Orthetrum coerulescens: the blue dragonfly. Explaining to Tomas that “. . . there are very few blue dragonflies in the world, nine or seven, or fewer still . . .” Iñes hopes to impress her teacher by catching the rare insect. “But not only for that reason,” Tomas explains. “There is another reason too.”

Click here for the full review.