In 1931, the doctor Jean Etxepare (1877-1935) published the travel book Beribilez (By Car). It is the account of a journey by car through the Basque Country, with a group of friends, in which we are offered a wide and singular imaginary of the territory in one of the most beautiful prose of the time, starting from Cambo-les-Bains in the northern Basque province of Lapurdi.
Jean Etxepare was a humanist with personality and a master of language. Beribilez is the sum of ideas that the writer had at the end of his life. Etxepare as an adult, he was 58 years old at the time, is more moderate than in his youth in explaining his intellectual choices, as the doctor suspected that he might die soon and only lasted four more years.
The problems he had in his youth with his first book Buruxkak (1910) are well known, so much so that he had to withdraw all copies from the market under the threat of his father. Etxepare was an intellectual of the highest calibre and somewhat peculiar in that clerical Iparralde which touched him; as if that were not enough, in those years, the confrontation the State and the Church was alive and well in France.
He had been closely acquainted with the thought of the time (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Haeckel, Reichenbach, Newman...), which was unusual in that milieu and at that time. In Beribilez we can see the effort made by the writer and at the same time the self-censorship to which he submits himself in order to create texts acceptable to contemporary society without renouncing his ideas.
Jean Etxepare's contributions also stand out from the point of view of both scientific and humanistic knowledge. On the one hand, from the scientific point of view, he describes the genesis of the world from a "ziliporta" (splash), when the indisputable faith in Creation still existed in the minds of many scholars; he also describes how the sea erodes the cliffs from a positivist point of view; he offers a humorous picture of quackery and medical pseudoscience, during his visit to San Sebastian; he recalls rural development (forestry, cider production, thermal waters); On the other hand, from a humanistic point of view, he reflects the concerns and challenges of the Basques motivated by modernisation and industrial development, with the worry that foreign industrialists would assume hegemony over the locals; he claims the moderate spirit (sofrosine) characteristic of Ancient Greece in 1931, different from the more vehement mood of his first biography. In his youth, he lost faith in his formative years at the University of Bordeaux and read, among other things, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche: on this last point, however, we do not know to what extent he had set out to conceal his true opinions in Beribilez (1931), for what might happen to his vocation as a writer, writing unsaleable books one after the other, as had already happened with Buruxkak (Spikes), his first book in 1910.
In short: Beribilez is the testament of the best Basque-language prose writer of the first third of the 20th century, in which the ideological-sentimental legacy of a promoter of Basque culture is collected for future generations, as Jean Etxepare was also president for years of the association Euskaltzaleen Biltzarra, promoter and disseminator of Basque heritage.
Basic bibliography:
Altonaga, Kepa (2006) Etxepare, Aldudeko medikua. Bilbo: Euskaltzaindia & UPV/ EHU. https://www.euskaltzaindia.eus/dok/iker_jagon_tegiak/66692.pdf [2022-07-27].Altonaga, Kepa (2022). Axularren gerizapean. Iruñea: Pamiela.Arrigain, Isabel (1992) "J. Etxepare" in: Etxepare, J. Buruxkak. Bilbo. Euskal Editoreen Elkartea. http://zubitegia.armiarma.com/?p=mar-154 [2011-X-23].Etchepare, Jean, (1931) Beribilez. Baiona: Laserre. http://www.memoriadigitalvasca.es/handle/10357/873 https://www.euskalmemoriadigitala.eus/handle/10357/873 [2022-07-27].Gartzia Trujillo, Sebastian (2014) Jean Etxepare, Aldudeko medikua. Euskal modernitatearen brankako irudia. Bilbo: Desclée de Brower.