The Wind From The East: A Novel (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
A big, fat novel. I’d resisted her books without too much difficulty, although the English translations are all over the UK best-seller lists and the 3-for-2 bins in the chain bookshops. ‘More Iberian ardour’ [!!], said a Financial Times review of the fat novel in question, Los Aires Difíciles - The Wind from the East, in English translation by my favourite literary translator from Spanish, Sonia Soto, while The Guardian described it as a ‘classy blockbuster’. Tssk, it’s so much more than that! A friend brought this back for me from a recent trip to Spain, and what a long, slow, delicious read it is. Now I've finished, I want to start right over and linger longer in this gentle, deep, detailed portrait of sorry, twisted but ultimately endearing psyches.Detail: so difficult to sustain without being boring. This is so detailed it takes 800 pages to tell the tale, and every word of that, to my taste, is worthwhile. Long, deep back-stories building up into a meticulous tableau of people and place. It’s like a slow build-up of paint, a group portrait in oils. Extraordinary really that it is maligned as a ‘blockbuster’, impressive only for its size. A novel of serious ideas is not supposed to be this rivetingly readable?It's a very still book. Still figures in a landscape - the broad, sandy beaches of the Cadiz coast. Still figures pondering the stories, the inexorable patterns, of their lives. Can the levante, the hot, dry, sometimes maddening East wind that blows on that coast, scour out the patterns of the past and make a space for new beginnings?I’ve been flicking through the book in search of a paragraph to quote in illustration of what I liked so much. But I’d be quoting from just one layer of this long, patient build-up of pigment, and would give no indication at all.Perhaps that passage where Maribel has been stabbed by her vile ex-husband? Where Sara, throughout their motorway dash to the hospital, see-saws between angry disbelief and despairing resignation?No, the whole impact of this fast, dramatic scene is that it bursts upon a long, quiet stream of story. To understand how good this novel is, you have to read it, plunge right in and spend some time.
What do You think about The Wind From The East: A Novel (2007)?
"The Spanish Maggie O'Farrell" fits Almudena Grandes well. It took me a long time to read this book -- nearly a month -- but it was for lack of time rather than lack of enjoyment. It's absorbing and atmospheric, and like O'Farrell, Grandes gives us less-than-perfect, morally ambiguous characters struggling with their demons. Sara and Juan have both escaped from Madrid and the problems of their lives there, and come to live on the Atlantic coast, where "Everything fled before the force of the wind like some powerful classical god." The wind is a constant theme; Juan, Sara, Maribel and the others are buffeted by life but somehow survive and find calm in each other's company' learning to cope with whatever the wind brings.A big thumbs up for the translation, by Sonia Soto: superb, the best translated work I've read in a long time. Not that I've read it in the original yet, but you forget immediately that you are reading a translation; a rare phenomenon. It's difficult to quote a passage because it's an accumulation of effects. The descriptive passages and internal monologues are limpid and free-flowing; the dialogue is realistic and modern. And the story, characters, and dialogue still feel very Spanish; it would be a great book to take on a Spanish holiday. I'll certainly be reading more of her work.
—Veronica
This was an interesting book - two neighbors are fleeing from their memories in Madrid. Neither are particularly nice people but both of them have been victimized a bit by the ones they love. They are hiding from their mistakes and they form a sort of family together (through the love of a good woman - their shared HOT housekeeper!)I did get pulled in a bit by the back dramas which I found more interesting than the present day story but I found the end to be a bit of an anticlimax after all the time I invested in getting to know the characters. They both seemed to disdain the woman that in the end, knew more about sacrifice and love than either of them.
—Sarah
