Almudena Grandes

Sonia Soto

The bestselling epic story from Spain's most provocative novelist makes its U.S. debut.

A Novel

The Wind from the East

Ditipriya Acharya

This Is Us

Andrés may not have been able to find the words to express what he was feeling, but he often thought of the Oemedos, of Sara and his mother, as people stranded together in an alien land, people who were lost but who, when they met, had been saved, because they found they could understand one another, speak the same language, laugh at the same jokes.

 Trying to write what the gist of Almudena Grandes’s The Wind From the East is about in just a few words, would be doing injustice to all the layers of the story and the topics she touches upon. It is difficult to maintain the attention of the readers when the story revolves around the lives a small group of people and it is a 600-page chunky book, but Grandes does this effortlessly.

The manner in which the story is written reminded me of the TV series This Is Us with its tendency to go back and forth in timelines, giving us only a glimpse at major details. The author of this novel has amazing control on the information she gave out at every stage so that it was difficult to guess the turning point of the story but when it did come it was totally believable. 

The book follows the stories of Sara Gómes Morales, a wealthy, middle-aged woman and Juan Olmedo, a mature orthopaedic doctor. Both of them have recently moved from Madrid to a small coastal Andalusian town, running away from secrets of their own. As she makes her journey from being a privileged, rich child to a burdened, lost woman, the story may appear surreal but the manner in which it is narrated keeps us gripped till the very end. While Sara lives alone, Juan lives with his mentally intellectually challenged brother Alfonso and his recently orphaned niece Tamara. What ties these two together is Maribel, the woman who works as domestic help in both their houses and her son Andrés. Soon they become a tightly knit family depending on each other during difficult times.

If there’s one thing that you should read this book for is the well-written characters, making them as real as your own acquaintances. One character that stands out is the east wind: as real as the other as it wreaks havoc in their lives. The passages in the book describing the wind flowing through Sara’s house or stunning Alfonso into silence as he stares at seagulls will stay with me forever.

The east wind blows it all away.

This would have definitely been a five-star read if not for a particular scene somewhere in the middle of the book that attempts to disguise what is definitely an act of domestic abuse as passion or love. In these times, when the implications of a slap are a major topic of discussion in India, it became difficult for me look past it.

Apart from that scene however this novel features some absolutely brilliant character development when it comes to the female characters. Grandes makes no attempts to force the women into moulds or label them as righteous or vamps. They are grey characters with their own negative and positive motivations. Neither does she go into the reasoning behind every move that the character makes, making them more realistic to jer readers. This made Charo’s character more grounded, even though we know her only from Juan’s memories and her actions seem quite bizarre in parts. She explores the duality in characters very well. My favourite would be Maribel, who is, on one hand, a woman who craves attention in her short dresses and high heels, but she is also a hard-working mother struggling to be independent.

Grandes tells the story of Juan’s passionate relationship with his sister-in-law in a way that seems natural. She has the ability to make us sympathetic towards characters even when they are in the wrong. A sign of her good writing is that till the end we cannot decide whether either of the main characters is truly a good person. Despite that, we are 100% on their side. And instead, she makes a question, what makes a good person. Grandes uses her lyrical writing to make scenes from Juan and Sara’s pasts appear dream-like to us.

The book is translated beautifully by Sonia Soto #namethetranslator from the original Spanish. While it is inevitable that some things are lost in translation, the fact that I wasn’t reading the book in the language that it was originally written in did not stop me from enjoying the novel thoroughly. Even though the novel follows the characters only for two years when you turn the last page you will go away with the feeling of having spent a lifetime with them.

Because they (crabs) don’t move backwards when they find an obstacle, they simply go around it. The poor little things are crafty, not cowards. Not backwards, but sideways.

The Wind from the East A Novel

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