{"id":432382,"date":"2020-05-29T10:58:41","date_gmt":"2020-05-29T14:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=432382"},"modified":"2020-05-29T10:58:41","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T14:58:41","slug":"the-wind-that-lays-waste-by-selva-almada-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/05\/29\/the-wind-that-lays-waste-by-selva-almada-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Wind That Lays Waste” by Selva Almada [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award<\/a>s<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Pierce Alquist\u00a0<\/strong>has an MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic and writer. She is also the Communications Coordinator for the Transnational Literature Series\u00a0<\/em>at Brookline\u00a0Booksmith, an author events series that\u00a0focuses\u00a0on stories of migration, the intersection of politics & literature, and works in translation.\u00a0She can be found on Twitter @PierceAlquist\u00a0and\u00a0on\u00a0Book Riot<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

The Wind That Lays Waste\u00a0<\/em><\/a>by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (Graywolf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Selva Almada\u2019s arresting debut, translated by Chris Andrews, four souls are \u201cthrown together on a single day in rural Argentina\u201d as a storm brews overhead. When Reverend Pearson\u2019s car breaks down, fate leads him and his teenage daughter Leni to the dusty, out-of-the-way garage of Gringo Bauer and his assistant Tapioca. The traveling Evangelical quickly takes an interest in Tapioca\u2019s pure soul, setting up the increasingly tense relationship between the mechanic and the man of god. As the storm breaks and the titular winds lay waste, the lives of these characters will be forever changed.<\/p>\n

The Wind That Lays Waste<\/em> is a profound examination of family and faith, a modern fable really. In comparison to the other books on the longlist, it\u2019s one in a trend of rural novels and yet it stands apart in its writing and approach\u2014told in one day and with only four main characters it may seem simple but in reality it\u2019s this refreshingly deep and thoughtful novel, a self-contained moment of time and place. A simplicity that I can imagine is one of the most challenging things for an author to write, and then a translator to convey.<\/p>\n

And what a translation it is! Perfect sentences abound, \u201cHis mother\u2019s skirt moved in front of him like a curtain revealing and hiding the landscape as the cloth blew about in the wind.\u201d And each character is compelling\u2014to describe them as \u201cfleshed out\u201d seems almost tongue-in-cheek as it doesn\u2019t come close to encompassing the depths to which Almada plunges into each character\u2019s heart and soul and Andrews masterfully captures it:<\/p>\n

But Leni had no lost paradise to revisit. Her childhood was very recent, but her memory of it was empty. Thanks to her father, the Reverend Pearson, and his holy mission, all she could remember was the inside of the same old car, crummy rooms in hundreds of indistinguishable hotels . . . and a mother whose face she could hardly recall. The Reverend completed his circuit and came back to where his daughter was standing, as rigid as Lot\u2019s wife, as pitiless as the seven plagues. Leni saw his eyes glistening and quickly turned her back on him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Wind That Lays Waste<\/em> is also set against one of the most powerful and beautifully described atmospheres of a novel I\u2019ve ever read. It\u2019s a novel that tangibly feels like weather. As the plot picks up, the characters swirl around each other and everything thickens like the dense, sticky, humidity that comes before the storm. As the story reaches its peak, tensions erupt like thunder and lightning and then the rains finally come. Whether or not they could have been stopped and the fate of these four characters changed is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

The storm had gathered in the blink of an eye. If they hadn\u2019t needed the rain so badly, the Gringo would have stopped it like his mother had taught him, because it wasn\u2019t looking pretty. She had passed the secret on to him before she died. Out in the open, facing the storm front, you drive an ax into the ground six times, to make three crosses and after the last blow you leave it stuck there. It\u2019s hard to believe if you\u2019ve never seen it done, but the sky opens and the raging storm turns into a blustery passing wind. The storm slinks off, with its tail between its legs, to someplace where no one knows the secret. But those who know it must use it with care. Every crack in the earth was crying out for rain. This was no time to turn a storm away.<\/p>\n

Nature\u2019s secret thought the Gringo, kills any secret man can know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Pierce Alquist\u00a0has an MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic and writer. She is also the Communications Coordinator […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[766,176,48176,71002,37876,70992],"class_list":["post-432382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-chris-andrews","tag-graywolf","tag-pierce-alquist","tag-selva-almada","tag-why-this-book-should-win","tag-wind-that-lays-waste"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432422,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432382\/revisions\/432422"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}