Review: Poussière dans le Vent (Dust in the Wind) by Leonardo Padura
I sit down to write this, still shaking with the emotion of finishing another masterpiece by Padura. He moves me like no other writer because he transports me to Cuba. A mere three-week visit, several years ago, left me with a feeling for the island that few other places have instilled in me and Padura never fails to reflect that feeling with 100% accuracy. It’s uncanny!
So I’m never going to let pass the opportunity to read a Padura work and I grab them when the arrive in their French translations, too impatient to await the English versions which always arrive much later.
This long novel is about exile and it resonates with my Irish soul since my compatriots were still emigrating in droves as recently as in my younger adult days. We’ve emerged into prosperity and education with the support of our great neighbours in Europe. Sadly Cuba is unlikely to emerge; if you’re an American reading this, hang your head in shame, because their poverty is directly down to your bullying country.
Padura tells the story, over a quarter century, of a small group of Cuban friends, most of whom eventually feel it necessary to leave (flee?) their homeland and he does a tremendous job of examining their motivations and sentiments. We get a heightened picture of a people rich in education but economically destitute. We see the oppression of independence akin to Stasi controlled East Germany and yet we also see a people who are terribly proud of their heritage. All this was blindingly obvious to me when I visited Cuba but Padura explains it profoundly. We come away understanding why they leave, but also why they stay! Padura himself has stayed so he must know why, but he has also lived through the history that drove so many away and he knows why so many go. And he understands both positions.
The one criticism I have of Padura (and I have it for all his books) is that women are described as (often intelligent but always as) sexual objects. This must offend many female readers. It offends me, a male reader. Curiously, in this book he addresses the subject of sex head-on. What I took away was summed up in the song Common People by Pulp:
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And you dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do
I don’t buy it. Too facile.
However, don’t let that put you off. Don’t approve but rise above it and you’ll learn about an amazing country and its people.
Asynchronists 