The Wind from the East by Almudena Grandes

Genre: Literary Fiction

Rating: 3.5 stars

“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 it is a 600-page chunky book about a group of people, but Grandes does this effortlessly.

The book skips between timelines, giving us only a glimpse at major details. The author of this novel has amazing control over the information she gives out at every stage, so it was difficult to guess the turning point of the story, but when it did come, it was totally believable.

The book follows 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. While Sara lives alone, Juan lives with his 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.

However, this novel features some absolutely brilliant character development when it comes to 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 ambivalent motivations. Neither does she go into the reasoning behind every move that the character makes, making them more realistic to her 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 the 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 us question what makes a good person?

While it is inevitable that some things are lost in translation, the book is translated beautifully by Sonia Soto from the original Spanish. 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.”