THE YEAR OF THE WIND, responsibility, grief, reconciliation in strife-riven 80s Peru

THE YEAR OF THE WIND
KARINA PACHECO MEDRANO (tr. Mara Faye Lethem)
Graywolf Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical novel depicting the devastating effects of political violence in Peru on three women’s lives

Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation’s fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara’s political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed.

In her first novel to be translated into English, Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A certain time in a person's life, an age meeting an historical moment, loom large forever after. For Nina, it's the rise of Sendero Luminoso in response to Peru's oligarchic fascism of the day. Authoritarians come in all flavors, and always start by promising change but never quite delivering it...but the promise is enough for some. The sense of acuteness prevalent in late adolescence/early adulthood is omnidirectional, questing, and restless. These people are very likely to fall into traps set by the status quo's defenders...extremism, armed rebellion, terrorism, all tend to reinforce the status quo because the general run of citizens are trained to be more afraid of pretty-unlikely events instead of focusing on quotidian acts of repression and oppression that inspire most revolutions.

Bárbara’s an exception, someone who got radicalized by the awful authoritarian acts taking place. Bárbara’s decision to resist on the ground in practical reality preceded her disappearance; we all know that means death but no closure allowed by the authoritarians to punish the survivors (and create more radicalized people to excuse more violence against the whole country). Nina, now living in Spain, is fiftyish, and runs into a fellow exile whose mere presence sets off the chain reaction of "what was Bárbara’s fate, how can I find out, guess it's finally time to go home" that forms the meat of this interrogation of family, of grief, of responsibility, of consequences.

Who's guilty? Of what? Bárbara’s fate was invited...but was it inevitable? Where does blame for her disappearance lie, the authoritarians in power or the authoritarian-wannabes whose message of change seduced so many into...questionable...acts?

It's told in lovely sentences, structured with many leaps of attention to different times. It's not linear but it does all connect as the jumps happen. It's not suddenly it's 1984 for no particular reason, but because Nina is encountering a trigger of some kind.

I found both prose and structure reinforced my sense of myself moving with Nina as she processed her deep sadness and grief and guilt. She survived a horrible time in Peru's history, and did it not least by escaping Peru. That marks a person, that abandonment, as much as the consequences of staying would do. No one escapes politically violent times unmarked, unfazed, undaunted by doubt. Nina begins her reckoning in his story. Painful questions arise; painful answers meet them; no process offers closure without that asking-answering reconciliation of memory and action.

It's a read I think offers more than it asks in attention. Attentive readers will find guidance from someone who has faced up to the tough realization: I played my part, too.

An excellent novel, strongly recommended.