THE WINDS OF MARACAIBO: A Novel, deeply felt, beautifully said family saga

THE WINDS OF MARACAIBO: A Novel
MARÍA ELENA MORÁN (tr. Madeline Jones)
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A propulsive family drama, the story of a woman determined to recover her kidnapped daughter in the ruins of Chávez’s social revolution—the fast-paced English-language debut of an award-winning and bestselling author that brings the Venezuelan migrant crisis to life in lyrical, seething prose, for readers of Elizabeth Acevedo, Jesmyn Ward, and Gabriela Garcia

It was too late, y la ternura no basta—now that she’d tasted the gunpowder, and the gunpowder was bolivariano, revolutionary. And that unthinkable traitor Camilo was using it to blow up her life.

“Elisa left with Camilo.” “Camilo took her out of the country.”

These are the text messages Nina receives while living in the storage room of a university in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she’s cleaning houses to make money to send back home.

Home is 4,500 miles away, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where the water never runs on Mondays and there’s yet another blackout. Where a trip to the grocery store costs 220 times the minimum wage.

Home is Elisa, her thirteen-year-old daughter, who loves to run around the house and belt out Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Who should be growing, when instead her waist is shrinking. Home is Graciela, Nina's mother, who lately stays shut up in her room all day talking with her dead, most urgently her beloved husband, Raúl (who’s just as eager to talk back from the grave).

And what the hell does Camilo think he’s doing now, stealing off with their daughter to the United States of America—the one place Nina most assuredly never wants to call home?

Narrated through the voices of Nina and her family, and through the voice of her treacherous ex, Camilo, The Winds of Maracaibo is the heart-racing tale of a mother fighting to get her daughter back across the border, at any cost—a brave and furious reversal of the American Dream and an ode to the Venezuelan women who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to a nation dismantled by the egos of men.

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

My Review: I wonder how many people in the US will make it past the brutal evocation of what our government's calculated-to-immiserate destruction of Venezuela's civil society resulted in. It's almost a third, more than a quarter, of the beginning of the book. This is a country our regime hates enough to have kidnapped its sitting president and first lady because they wouldn't pay the vig that was demanded of them.

The living and the dead speak to us. It's a narrative structure that will take some time to settle into, though I think it's less off-putting than the rage they all feel, the terrible emotional toll they've paid and keep paying in this manufactured chaos, and the terrible decisions they make under its duress. I was so deeply offended by the intended-yet-impersonal misery and chaos they all, in their different ways, endure. My human fellow feeling circuits overheated multiple times.

The awful truth of people living under occupation and under economic sanctions is that they are not capable of...do not have the capacity to think...any thinking beyond the shortest of horizons. That's what survival mode does to a human being. It makes the people in its toils easily manipulable, its real intent, but it also causes their moral capacities to...short circuit, is my best approximation.

Camilo, lookin' right at you, miserable "enchufado" bastard. (Really worth looking up, Anglophones.)

The recent history, the past thirty years or so, of Venezuela has been dominated by Hugo Chávez and his disrupted revolution. One guess who did the disrupting...the results of that reformist binge collapsing have been horrendous for average Venezualans like Nina. She's forced to leave her young daughter Elisa with her own mother Graciela, recently widowed by Raúl's death and struggling emotionally, financially, and practically. Elisa is thus parentified much to her resentful fury, which means when Nina's father Camilo shows back up with the idea of moving to the US so as to earn their money there, Elisa jumps at the chance to be a kid again.

Nina finds out when Graciela thinks to tell her Camilo's got Elisa now and they went to the US. Tank goodness, right? No! Nina's carrying a load of fury towards the US for its wanton destruction of her country, a thing that seems not to bother Camilo and exists in the same nebulous faraway as the rest of reality to Graciela. None of this happens as neatly as I'm presenting it to you. All those PoVs are following each other but not linearly, rather in twining braids of recursion. It's not direct but it felt more like I was in the natural process of getting to know the characters.

Given that I related most powerfully to the highly principled Elisa, who rejected Camilo and all he represented because he should only rot under the pile of money he's stolen from worthier needier people, you might feel surprise when I say Raúl's PoV, anguished for the unhappy present of the family he loves and annoyed he can't make them see sense, was the one that often moved me to tears. Graciela is overmatched by reality and Elisa is warping under the strain of growing up too fast. Nina is rigidly refusing to budge an inch; great for a single person but not for a mom.

It's a moving, enlightening family saga of mess, real-feeling people, and a very lovely story to read.

Until you think about what it means.

Sleep tight GOP voters.