Name: Denis Crepaldi's review of The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada
Item: The Wind That Lays Waste
Rating: 2.5
Author: Denis Crepaldi

Selva Almada

A taut, lyrical portrait of four people thrown together on a single day in rural Argentina The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God or fate leads them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and a young boy named Tapioca. As a long day passes, curiosity and intrigue transform into an unexpected intimacy between four people: one man who believes deeply in God, morality, and his own righteousness, and another whose life experiences have only entrenched his moral relativism and mild apathy; a quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic’s assistant, and a restless, skeptical preacher’s daughter. As tensions between these characters ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances are tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains. Selva Almada’s exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a tactile experience of the mountain, the sun, the squat trees, the broken cars, the sweat-stained shirts, and the destroyed lives. The Wind That Lays Waste is a philosophical, beautiful, and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.

A Novel

The Wind That Lays Waste

Jenna

i’d say the book looks kind of incomplete.. the discussions on God and religion were interesting but I felt the author didn’t go deep in anything on this story.. neither Tapioca’s story nor Leni nor any of the characters.. the reading was easy, though.

Denis Crepaldi

not really a book where "things happen" for better or for worse depending on the type of thing that you're interested in but an interesting and dramatic story of religious interloper-y unravelling a carefully cultivated family unit. i think that there are gestures toward bigger themes here but with the lightest possible touch. this style works best with the prose - which is spare and poetic but doesn't necessarily fulfil a sort-of amped-up novelistic ambition if you're looking for something with more teeth.

Tom Lawlor

Maurice FitzGerald

This is hard to review. It is about an s few people who live in a small, tiny world. Like a world, a person whose entire existence is from what they see on television and what they read in school. The actual physical realness of things ends up being superfluous to these silly games the people play because no one want to actually live in that messy real world. A sad, empty secular world where meaning is overwhelmed by joyless aping of misunderstood indoctrination. In this book, no one is alive. The author gave up years ago and this is a message to the world to just give up on any hope of the future. Humans are no agents of meaning in these book, and empty feeling of bemused superiority is. Funny getting that from a piece of writing with about as much mind-expanding capability as a bullet in your brain.

Siya S

2.5 stars, round up to 3 

This is my first book by Selva Almada. It was ok but nothing much happened in the book. It's about a preacher and his daughter going on a trip to see a family's friend. Then the car broke down so they took shelter at the mechanic's place where he worked with his son.

I think it lacks depth but with exceas of Christian preaching I got quite annoyed and at some point I wondered if the whole point of the Reverend was just an elaborated sarcasm.

Gary Homewood

A preacher having left his wife, traveling with his daughter, break down and spend time with a mechanic in a remote part of the world and a young boy that's been left with him. 

Sparse, perfectly paced and beautifully written from each point of view, including, brilliantly, that of a dog.

Religion, landscape and a storm. Faulkner and metaphor, but filmically original and a great read.

Jenna &
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada

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The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada