Novel
En diciembre llegaban las brisas
Not translated into English
Marvel Moreno · 1987
Synopsis
From Paris, Lina remembers Barranquilla in the late sixties and the lives of three women of her family and her milieu. Dora, who was married off to a man who treats her like a thing. Catalina, wed to an ambitious man who finds in her his entry into the bourgeoisie and the alibi for what he hides. Beatriz, raised in fear of sin. Around them, the city, its carnivals, its closed houses, its doctors and its confessors. Lina watches and wonders what she might have become.
Context
Published in Barcelona in 1987, after twenty years spent in France, and written about the city the author had left. The book has been called the bible of Barranquilla: it is not the chronicle of one family but of several, and the portrait of an entire society gripped by what it does to its women. A French critic saw in it, on its publication, a novel that overflowed the limits of a national literature, to be ranked with the two or three that count in that country.
Who it is for
A little under three hundred pages in Spanish. The narrative passes from one woman to another without warning; the reader must accept losing the thread and finding it again.
Prizes and reception
Translated into French and Italian, it received in Italy in 1989, for its translation, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign book; one of the great Colombian novels of the century.