Padura published a new novel these months, and before I read it, I reinvented myself by reading Como polvo en el viento (Tusquets, 2020) that I last read from him. With this author, you know you’ll always have a great few hours of reading. Also, considering that he tells us about the Cuban diaspora, his perspective is very interesting as he has always lived on the island. Leonardo Padura is a novelist who knows how to convey people’s deepest feelings in a seemingly everyday narrative thread. It’s easy to explain, but there is incredible depth in each of the important paragraphs. And of course it didn’t disappoint me then, and now I enjoy it even more now that I know their characters and content.
The author describes the life of a group of Cuban friends, the “clan”, in Havana in 1980 in this magnificent, 700-page novel: Clara and Darío; Irving and his boyfriend Joel; Horace, Bernardo, Elisa and Walter. In “Special Period in Times of Peace,” a euphemism used to denote the lack of support from the Soviet Union, we will learn about their life on the island and the diaspora of many over the next three decades. gaps: Barcelona, Madrid, Florida, Puerto Rico, New York… All and all their being is like dust in the wind, the result of the slogan and story that became the main motif of the 1977 song by Kansas Dust in The Wind: Dust in the wind , it’s all dust in the wind.
As I was reading about those lives of the clan, I remembered who and to whom the Cuban Language Academy had told about the taxi driver we had “adopted” (could have been another member of our group) in Havana four years ago. We told him that his wife is an engineer and he is a pediatrician, but he left the profession because he earned a lot more than a taxi driver, or, in his own words, because he “earned a little more”. Along with his questions about the Spanish television programs they watched there, through “El paquete”: a CD on which many programs were recorded and changed every week by subscribing to that secret broadcasting system. Anecdotes that could be part of Padura’s novel. The pure reality that not everyone is willing to put up with: «[…] And they left Cuba because they couldn’t help living in a god-forsaken country, and they couldn’t help living in a country where people even went out the window because they were determined to fix things with the same solutions that never worked there. .526); because during my stay I was able to confirm: «[…] they lived in a city about to collapse, in a country where a quarter of its buildings were in agony, most of them supported by crutches and pitchforks” (p.207). And so it was, they fell in front of you.
The novel is structured in ten chapters, in which the author’s mastery of the novel is revealed in the processing of time and the construction of characters. Time is non-linear and with its jumps structures the narrative flow and the creation of each character. It does not suffer from certain aspects of serialization and the use of coincidence, both elements give the novel that literary distance we love so much that separates the traditional novel from the chronicle, such that throughout its pages, we get excited, we get angry, we understand, we justify, and we forgive.
And why should you read this novel? Because you will enjoy a slow and deep reading, a mix of personal action and emotions, all so real, yet covered with a literary patina that makes them so compelling and deeply heartfelt; they come together and end up in the pure concept of Brotherhood, which is really the theme of the novel and becomes the great value of life, which will turn to dust in the wind.