Quick Review: The Wind Knows My Name
The Wind Knows My Name is the most recent work by Chilean-American author Isabel Allende, recipient of numerous awards in both countries. Perhaps she’s past it, perhaps she was never all that good and was only promoted due to her politics, but the book absolutely sucks on a variety of levels.
Firstly: the plot is wooden and predictable. The novel covers a man who escapes the Holocaust as a young boy on the Kindertransport, a young women who escapes a massacre in her native El Salvador and flees to the US, and various other characters who all end up intertwined with these. No character ever behaves or thinks in a two-dimensional way, and the world they live in has all the sophistication and complexity you’d expect if it were dreamed up by a socialist teenager.
The written style is occasionally very fine, most commonly utterly banal, and on a number of occasions outright hectoring. Allende is utterly incapable of seeing the world as her characters see it: we are repeatedly dragged out of 1938 Vienna and into 2023 Los Angeles by sentences like:
The friendship between Adler and Steiner centered around mutual affinities and deeply held values.
Or:
On the days she received students, the air always smelled of fresh-baked cookies.
Allende will write long paragraphs describing events which the characters ought to be at best faintly aware of, then brush over events which are implied to be of great emotional heft. The youngish mother Rachel Adler undergoes the humiliation of sleeping with a Chilean diplomat who holds over her the possibility of visas. This could be a great emotional turning point, a central demonstration of her despair. It could be a telling but ultimately minor point in the overall story. Allende attempts to have it both ways, writing two-and-a-half brief paragraphs about the event and Adler’s intense discomfort (shame? Fear? Raw disgust? We are really never told) before dropping the issue, never to be mentioned again.
Leticia, a young Salvadoran who narrowly escapes the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, is early on given a small plastic cross: “the pastor… explained that it glowed in the dark, just as Jesus’ love shone in times of darkness.” A wonderfully chosen detail follows a page later: “She wanted to see if her little plastic cross truly glowed in the dark, but it never turned to night on that hospital ward, where the lights were left on at all times.” Then only a further three pages on, this cross disappears as swiftly as it appeared, lost while swimming across the Rio Grande; we see nothing of how Leticia responds to this.
Beyond all of this, none of the characters are distinctive. They all think and speak in the same voice, they are all moved by the same things. The most humanising novels show us characters making mistakes from the inside: showing us not only that they are clearly harming themselves, but making it very understandable why this feels the right thing for them to do. Allende does not even attempt this, I don’t think she ever recognises any of her perspective characters doing something “wrong”.
There are scenes which are utterly cringeworthy and cloying, such as the young Samuel Adler being initially forbidden from taking his violin onto the Kindertransport until he gets it out and performs a Schumann serenade, driving everyone around him into tears. There are whole pages given over to rants about politics, again very obviously from a 2023 perspective rather than that of the characters1. There is very little in the novel to recommend.
From pp2-3: “Since that March, when Germany had annexed Austria and the Nazi Wehrmacht paraded its military pomp and circumstance through the heart of Vienna to a cheering, jubilant crowd, Rudolph Adler had been plagued with fear. His worries had began a few years prior and only worsened as Nazi power was consolidated through increased financing and a growing stockpile of weapons. Hitler used terror as a political tactic, taking advantage of discontent over economic woes after the humiliating defeat in the Great War and the Great Depression in 1929. In 1934, Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated in a failed government coup, and since then eight hundred others had been killed in various attacks. The Nazis intimidated their detractors, provoked disturbance, and pushed Austria to the brink of civil war. At the start of 1938, internal violence was so untenable that Germany, from the other side of the border, exerted pressure to annex the troubled country as one of its provinces. Despite the concessions that the Austrian government had made to Germany demands, Hitler ordered an invasion. The Nazi party had laid the groundwork for the invading force to be met with open arms by the majority of the population. The Austrian government surrendered and two days later Hitler himself entered Vienna, triumphant. The Nazis quickly seized total control. Opposition was declared illegal. German laws and SS and Gestapo oppression, as well as antisemitic policies, went into immediate effect.” Do this sound like the concerns and phrasing of a 1930s Jewish communist?