December Breeze
A masterful novel on womanhood in Colombia
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
From her home in Paris, Lina recalls the story of three women whose lives unfold in the conservative city of Barranquilla in Colombia. Amongst parties at the Country Club and strolls along the promenade in Puerto Colombia, unfurls a story of sensuality supressed by violence; a narrative of oppression in which Dora, Catalina and Beatriz are victims of a patriarchal system living in and among the fragile threads of the fabric of society.
In Lina's obsessive recounting of the past, this masterful novel transforms anecdotes of a life into an absolute view of the world, a profound panorama of Colombian society towards the end of the 50s.
Written from personal memories and historical research, this is a novel that is both precise and poetic, a novel that immortalises—from the distant perspective of its narrator—the events that took place in a small seaside town.
Distancing herself from her contemporaries of the Latin-American literary boom with a boldly feminist narrative, Marvel Moreno has created a world that both mirrors the close-up, private lives of the people of Barranquilla and the human condition itself.
*WHAT NETGALLEY READERS ARE SAYING*
"Just delightful."
"Full of a fierce fightback against generations of misogyny and toxic masculinity. This book is powerful."
"A wonderfully written and sensually feminist novel."
"I'd read Moreno again like a shot."
"There's something deliciously unexpected, even subversive about Moreno's prose."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Colombian writer Moreno (1939–1995) makes her English-language debut with a layered if diffuse story of late 1970s Colombia. Lina, an inveterate reader, offers an incisive perspective on the lives of three women, all of whom were former classmates. The sensual Dora marries a brutish, narcissistic medical doctor named Benito Suárez, pointedly named for Mussolini by his Italian mother. Catalina, daughter of a beautiful socialite, is coveted by many, but she marries the secretly gay Alvaro Espinoza, a domineering psychiatrist and sometime provincial governor. Finally, there's Beatriz, who marries Javier, but whose dalliance with would-be revolutionary Victor has drastic consequences. Lina saves Dora from Benito after he attacks her, and Catalina takes revenge on Alvaro by manipulating him into committing suicide. Though the long, convoluted sentences wear on the reader, as does the lack of cohesion, Lina's insights on domineering men are hard to ignore (" seemed to her like those enemies that stalk mankind, like disease and madness, forces that need to be warded off in the name of dignity"). Fans of the Latin American Boom will want to give this a look.
