the book “The wind will burn” by Guillermo Saccomanno won the XXVIII Alfaguara Prizewith a reward of $175,000 and publication, in the month of March, in all Spanish-speaking countries.
The novel by the well-known Argentine writer, author among other books of classics such as “El oficinista” and “Cámara Gesell”, was chosen among the 725 manuscripts received by the Alfaguara label, by a jury chaired by the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vázquez, the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero, the Spanish film director Paula Ortiz, the writer Manuel Jabois, the bookseller Andrea Stefanoni and the editor of Alfaguara, Pilar Reyes, with voice but without vote.
“Is the story of a degradationof an agonizing peeling that little by little exposes the miseries of the social body. Exposed to the influence of the Esterházys, the strange Argentine coastal town allows the darkness that circulates through its underground areas to emerge, as if the visitors were an evil touchstone that managed to bring to light the true nature of the characters. Written in a sparse style and with a rare intensity, the novel is the careful construction of a deterioration that, although it takes place in a specific country, ends up being a distorted metaphor for the spirit of our time,” is how the jury described in the word of its president, the content of this story that will reach bookstores throughout the Hispanic world next March.
The figure of a town and the history of a family in that town (a coastal town like Villa Gesellthe city where Saccomanno lives) are protagonists of a story of degradation and corruption, in a space that functions as a microcosm of a deterioration that is everywhere.
According to the author, who attended the ceremony from Buenos Aires along with Juan Ignacio Boido, director of Penguin Random House Argentina, he decided to participate in the contest, despite being a writer with a long career, because he enjoyed competing and thinking about the surprise that the jury would have, if he won, when they discovered that his name was hidden behind the pseudonym Jim.
Here, a preview of the beginning of “The Wind Will Burn”:
“The body will appear in a neighborhood in the south, five 9 mm hits. We are not going to go into detail about where the bullets hit him, whether in the left lung, in the liver, wherever. Detailing the impacts does not clarify the matter much. Nobody saw anything. But the blood is there. Let’s not act like we didn’t see. Someone always saw. And he could be seen seeing. There are few of us in this town and we know each other, bad news circulates before the radio, TV and newspaper. And if you scratch a little, you will find connections between the murder and the members of the living forces. We repeat ourselves, it is true, there are stories that gain prominence for a time and then are replaced by others and forgotten. And each one, a whole novel. For example, the Habsburg Hotel. If a few lives are linked to him as they are remembered, it is through Moni, the owner who surfed with a somewhat old-fashioned sensual elegance, but which was style in her. Sex, money, betrayal, murders, corruption tacitly had to do with her, Moni, who assumed all the time an innocence worthy of a faithful wife, a devoted mother and, haloing her, the fame of the town’s poet. It would also be necessary to take into account her spouse, Count Esterházy, the Hungarian nobleman obsessed with the blank canvas, who acted as a cursed artist, alcoholic and lost timberman, capable of selling his soul to the devil if he had not already done so in the time of these events. And the offspring of both, the little house, a freak team that cannot be overlooked; the strabismic kid, a victim at school, who would turn humiliation into an alchemy of bizarre terrorist ideas and contempt for human beings that he would try to put into practice. At her side, inseparable, was Aniko, her emaciated and languid sister, fond of a spiritualism guided by the I Ching, which she would use as an oracle to explain her destiny to anyone who consulted her. Gardener, bricklayer, carpenter, butler, custodian, lover, Tobi must be added to the group, the farmer in love with his landlady, gifted as a donkey. In addition, there are the municipal officials, they say, Greco, the mayor, Damonte, the Secretary of Planning, always questioned by conflicts linked to bribes and influences, the rinses of the Deliberative Council, and their respective families. And we will not leave out Nancy, the Greco’s trusted domestic, owner of their privacy, their secrets. Those who cannot be separated are the police, among whom Commissioner Barroso stands out, with his methods inherited from the repression of the dictatorship. If you look for direct or indirect connections between Moni, later a libertine writer, an emulator of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and it will not be necessary to delve much through wrinkled sheets to see that gossip, like all mythology, must have a real undertow . And there we have, among others, the Polish Tomasewski, the ironmonger as troubled as his pianist daughter, condemned to the frustration of her artistic aspirations. Let’s include Dulce, the Japanese widow harvester of cannabis, the most striking flower in the town and her oil job. In this plot we cannot miss Dante, the veteran editor of El Vocero, a weekly pamphlet, redundant to say, that accounts for all the voices of our community. And let’s not forget Virgilio, his remisero friend who takes him through our hell from a press conference to a crime scene or, clandestinely, to meetings with his lover at nap time. We look up at the cloudy sky, not crying out for help, but because of the intrigue aroused in us by that small plane that once again flies over the Villa and will land at the airfield that is closed in winter but, nevertheless, there are about four black women waiting. And coming back, in the same way that we could continue expanding this casting, we could continue combining hypotheses about the reasons for the shot corpse, the blood that ends up sucked by the sand. Welcome, as the founder of our Village promised, to the spa that is recommended from friend to friend.”
You may also be interested
Image gallery
