Ecuadorian Natalia García Freire presents her second novel, You brought the wind with you, published by La Navaja Suiza in Spain and Himpar Ediciones in Colombia. García Freire explores shadows, lines of fictional reality and imagination, just as he develops his own topothesia, the definition of a landscape, a place constructed within symbolic spatiality, where such symbolic spaces are located. matter associated with memory, transformable by the relentless passage of time. Memory, that stubborn ghost in an uncertain time of sepia color, fuzzy and torn, wind that carries timeless echoes and can upset those who live in it, the living have become wild because they live in fear, the fire within the characters. , constant, insatiable and merciless violence (“once I forced Zaida to slap her finger with the big stone with which we broke our totes”), violence with impunity as orphanhood and eviction of the land (realism is social), the vibrations of their joy, the warmth of their emotions that accompany the characters throughout their childhood memories It is the aforementioned landscape that sets the tone for their fears, the bitterness of their nostalgia.
Nine episodes, attitude and colour, nine characters, nine narrator voices, and each character is tied to an animal and a landscape, but they come together in Cocuán. Coquan is the name of the generic drug the author took during the genesis of the novel, which gives its name to the town (Cocuán) of the narrative, the “pain of the countryside,” an overlapping place where voices resonate and resonate. like a howl, an indistinguishable void but with its own elements (hay, forest, trail, river), through which savages and elements retreat far from the Andean archetype. A conflict between the traditional side that exploits the land and the indigenous side that protects the life of the places, a constant conflict in the forest as the only safe place in a land that is fertile for nature but crazy for man.
Influenced by Argentinian Sara Gallardo, North American William H. Gass and Shirley Jackson, the novel begins with Mildred’s story, which other characters refer to from their own perspectives, forming a kaleidoscope of what’s going on. We’re dealing with fallible, vulnerable, sick characters like Mildred, covered in scars, covered in wounds, resentful like Ezequiel, with a “brain like a mad maze”, grown with a violence that perpetuates this violence in their own “carved hills world”, “without bandages” to cover what I see there; Rumors like Agustina, “I’ll tell you what I know”, “we are made of dust and evil, like nightmares” and “I wanted to kill him… because I was dark inside. Like all of us”; without spiritual consolation like the new priest Manzi; like Carmen and those chasing beyond the rock of madness to the rhythm of unexpected howls; like Víctor and the search for “bodies nourished by the sweet milk of the earth”; like Baltasar and the death of “the girl who drew the mist with her voice”; Hermosina and like an incombustible inner fire, like Philatelio, who listens to “the wind, that warm wind, the wind that lowers the waters, the wind that brings the doves and swallows.” but a trail of light that no one sees, because no one can see.
Cocuán is a “fair of brutality” with “dirty water and filth”, “meat, cow poop, thick pigskin and bird piss, it smells like madness”, “the rotten mouse heart beating at its centre”. Cocuán, which everyone knows and doesn’t know what it is. Heartbreak and restlessness, disrespect and cruelty. Death and wind.
Source: Informacion
