It was one of the main literary ebentos of the beginning of the century and the serpent told the woman: the quick appreciation of the readers (four editions in the first year), of the critics, of the recompense (The Book of Veteri, Critique of Spain, Euskadi, Silver awards), of the imminent Spanish translation. Joseba Gabilondo admonishes us: it was not only an event, “but a social event, a uplift that touches us all. In fact, it is a fact that drives us all – often without reading the book – to have an opinion.” Imagine, with only that novel Eight Universes, eight were included in the canonizing writer Oñbella, Arantxa Iturbe, before Castillo Suárez or Uxue Apaolaza, for example. But let’s see, as that apocryphal tango said, eleven (11) years don’t go debalde.

To sew the thread lightly, say that the novel is starring Teresa, her journey and stay with her husband in the city of Vienna called W., the home of the former lover, which brings an earthquake. And, as Iratxe Retolaza pointed out, despite the abundance of other lines of observation (the impossibility of exile and the desire, the search for the absence of identity, the limits created by time, language, femininity, whiteness), we have here the emptiness of the woman as the subject, the prominence, the futility of the relationships of couples with men, the lack of communication, as can also be read as the representation of the woman Teresa. Going even further, he broke limited clichés according to the opinions of the time with the character mentioned by Oñuela, to the point of giving a new image of the Basque woman.

I don’t know exactly how things would have worked at that distant turn of the century, but I find it hard to think that anyone who has doubts about the institution of matrimony, who turns around with the dichotomy of an active man-woman doll, who says that virginity is the most precious thing, even to contradict it, even to put it flat, could be the paradigm of the new image of Basque women. I was convinced that these speeches, the ideas opposed to these ideas, were a matter of a decade, two years ago. Or maybe the problem is that they didn’t have a reflex in Basque literature until Oñuela arrived. However, today, and fortunately, we have overcome them, at least on a theoretical level, they also seem archaic to us in the literature. And I don't know if this novel would have the warm reception it had when it came out today, probably not. Which is more interesting, by the way, than keeping things intact for eleven (one machine) years.