Publishers Weekly
07/15/2019
The drama of this refreshingly unpredictable debut, set in the author’s native Argentina, smolders like a lit fuse waiting to touch off its well-orchestrated events. Four primary characters shape the plot: Gringo Brauer, a mechanic in the countryside; Tapioca, his young son and assistant; the Reverend Pearson, an evangelical preacher whose disabled car is towed to Brauer’s garage; and Leni, Pearson’s rebellious teenage daughter. Over the course of a single afternoon, Pearson, who thinks of himself smugly as “an arrow burning with the flame of Christ,” attempts to convert Tapioca, despite Brauer’s complete indifference to religious faith. When Pearson tries to persuade Brauer to let Tapioca come with him, because he sees the boy as a “pure soul” lacking the flaws he himself had at that age, the stage is set for a finale that explodes to the accompaniment of a furious thunderstorm. All of the characters have rich, multidimensional personalities that engage the reader’s sympathy—even Pearson, whose arrogant swagger is counterbalanced by the sincerity of his faith. The characters’ thoughtful discussion of their beliefs—and the potential for both violence and grace that overshadows their interactions—results in a stimulating, heady story. (July)
From the Publisher
“Like Flannery O’Connor and Juan Rulfo, Almada fills her taut, eerie novel with an understanding of rural life, loneliness, temptation and faith.”—BBC Culture
“Perhaps most powerful in the book is Almada’s focus on detail—she skillfully renders the story of a day in brief chapters that reveal the thoughts and fleeting encounters of characters, who are largely living inside themselves.”—Ploughshares
“Argentinian fiction writer and poet Almada makes her English-language debut with a slender tale redolent of Flannery O’Connor. . . . [The Wind That Lays Waste is] fueled by alcohol, religious symbolism, and doubt. . . . The story packs a punch in its portraits of a man who exalts heaven and another who protests.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Almada weaves together a quick and tightly told novel. . . . Capturing the soul of rural South America, a place of longstanding truths and pivotal conversions, [The Wind That Lays Waste] is Almada's debut novel and her first work to be translated into English. She's been billed as a ‘promising voice’ in Latin American literature, and this tale delivers readily on that promise.”—Booklist
“The Wind That Lays Waste is elegant and stark, a kind of emblem or vision fetched from the far edges of things, arrested and stripped to its essence, as beautiful as it is unnerving. Selva Almada burns off all the dross and gives us pure revelation, cryptic and true.”—Paul Harding, author of Tinkers
“The Wind That Lays Waste is a mesmerizing novel, at once strange and compelling.”—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
Kirkus Reviews
2019-04-14
Sturm und Drang on the pampas.
Argentinian fiction writer and poet Almada makes her English-language debut with a slender tale redolent of Flannery O'Connor—and, at some turns, Rod Serling. An itinerant preacher, one of those hands-on, evil-spirits-out kind, is on the road with his 16-ish daughter, her mother a long-distant memory in the rear-view mirror. The daughter, Leni, is full of doubts, sheltering herself with a music player on which she's promised dad to "listen to Christian music, nothing else," but instead has been catching hints of the bigger world outside. When their car breaks down, the Rev. Pearson and Leni wind up in El Gringo Brauer's garage. If the Rev. is a fire-and-brimstone true believer, Brauer is just as dedicated an atheist: "Religion was for women and the weak," he thinks. Meanwhile, his assistant, a motherless boy about Leni's age named Tapioca, is proving susceptible to the preacher's blandishments. "Now he was thinking that perhaps he should have warned the kid about the stories in the Bible," thinks Brauer—since, after all, "It wouldn't be so easy to get that stuff about God out of his head." If Leni would just as soon be dancing to disco music, Tapioca is ready to follow the Rev. Pearson out of the backwater and see the world, joining the crusade. Brauer objects, naturally. Well, what are the angels of good and evil supposed to do? Wrestle with each other, of course, in an apocalyptic rainstorm of a kind that levels crops, knocks down power poles, and fries someone with righteous lightning. Almada's story, fueled by alcohol, religious symbolism, and doubt, feels a touch incomplete; she might have given a little more space to the things that make each character tick. Still, the story packs a punch in its portraits of a man who exalts heaven and another who protests, "I don't have time for that stuff" while confused youngsters watch and wait.
A welcome new voice in Latin American storytelling.
