Un libro que todos, y especialmente todas, deberían leer. Moreno escribe de una forma magistral y llena de significados que van atrapando y generando reflexiones distintas en quien la lee. Esto lo logra a través de las historias de personajes femeninos muy diversos y, en su mayoría, profundos y complejos, algo que es difícil de encontrar. Al terminar el libro queda uno con una comprensión de las muchas formas en las que lo femenino es maltratado y denigrado en la sociedad, de cómo a través de acciones cotidianas se condena a las mujeres a destinos dolorosos de los que muy pocas pueden escapar. Moreno rescata la sabiduría tradicional y entendimiento femeninos que generalmente se desprecian o se consideran transgresores, y que sirven para imaginar otras posibilidades de ser mujer (y ojalá de ser hombre también) en el mundo. Es un libro algo doloroso en su retrato de la realidad de muchas mujeres, crudo en la forma en la que narra algunos episodios violentos como si hubieran sido inevitables, y a pesar de esto muy hermoso.

"Pura hipocresía, le afirmaba Lina: la sociedad quería tener buena conciencia ocultando el hecho de que la mitad de sus miembros podían asimilarse a los esclavos de antaño".

I’d like to liken the feeling of reading December Breeze by Marvel Moreno to a feminine version of works by [a:Gabriel García Márquez|13450|Gabriel García Márquez|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1588856705p2/13450.jpg], but such views would be too simplistic. Compared to Gabo, Moreno is less well-known in the English-speaking world. December Breeze was not translated into English until 2022 when this translation by [a:Isabel Adey|18294172|Isabel Adey|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] and [a:Charlotte Coombe|4049049|Charlotte Coombe|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] brought due recognition to Moreno. Stylistically, I immediately noticed elements similar to Gabo’s works such as long paragraphs, few conversations between characters, the length of the story that spans several generations, and elements of magical realism. What distinguishes Moreno in this story is the setting – Barranquilla, a port city in the northern part of Colombia, where Moreno’s traditional wealthy family resided.

In addition to magical realism, December Breeze brings about elements of dazzling realities. Moreno’s characters philosophise at the beginning of each chapter, sometimes to the point of criticising the philosophies of her time. One particular scene that stays in my head is when one character called Beatriz spends her time idling at home reading [b:The Second Sex|457264|The Second Sex|Simone de Beauvoir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327978178l/457264._SY75_.jpg|879666] – a seminal work on feminism – that fills the gap in her activities. Yet as Beatriz reads it, she comes to realise how her life and previous intellectual pursuit have been reduced to the role of a housewife tending to the needs of her husband and children, as well as fulfilling the expectations of her and her husband’s influential families. Her realisation brings her to reassess as well how despite modern life liberating women – in terms of empowering them with choices with regards to work and sexual life – there exist some shortcomings in the way her life is still turned upside down due to that very liberty. She got raped and thus brought into her complex situation.

I see December Breeze, with its complexity of plots and characterisation, as a novel about liberating oneself from one’s undesirable situation. Each character has their own share of undesirable situations, from forced marriages into uneasy social standings, from female characters seeking to liberate themselves from the tyranny of patriarchy to wealthy individuals seeking redemption by becoming communists. They find ways to navigate the oppression surrounding them (and sometimes, overcome them).

The title of this book, December Breeze, might make you think you're in for some bittersweet romance—but you'd be mostly wrong. There is nothing that could answer to the notion of 'sweetness' in this long novel though there is plenty of bitterness, and often as a result of the misapprehension of the notion 'romance'.

There is also a lot of wisdom in this novel. The wisdom is delivered by a trio of impressively strong women. These women, who each dominate a different section of the novel, are the grandmother and grand-aunts of the main character, Lina, who grew up in Barranquilla in Columbia during the nineteen-forties and fifties.

But to call Lina the main character is a bit misleading because in each of the three sections, it is the story of one of her three school friends that becomes the main subject matter. Lina is a confidante to each of the girls in turn, and her grandmother and aunts are somehow connected to one or other of them as well.

If I'm going into the structure of this book, it's because I found it very curious. Lina is at the centre of the book because without her we'd never hear the stories of her three friends (it's a close third narration from Lina's point of view with hardly any dialogue). But the strange thing is that we never learn very much about Lina herself in the 450 pages of the book although we hear every detail of the dramas of her friends' lives. She knows these details because even if she wasn't always present at each episode of each drama, the friends have told her about them or she has met someone years later who was present or who had heard from someone else who was present, and so on and so on.

Does that make you think of a labyrinth of nested narratives? That's exactly how this narrative rolls out. We are constantly entering side-rooms off each main story. These side-rooms are invariably peopled with new characters, and instead of the narrative returning to the main story to pick up its thread, we often find ourselves entering yet another side-room where even more new characters are introduced—and how relieved we are when we occasionally recognise one of these 'new' characters from one of the side-rooms of the other two main stories!

I'm using the notion of 'labyrinth' and 'side-room' on purpose because in one of the side-rooms of the third main story, a curious house is described. It is round like a tower, and in the centre is a room with mirrors on the walls and with openings into side-rooms which lead to other rooms and so on. The rooms all have a frieze along the top of the wall with symbols that tell some sort of story if a person has patience to puzzle out its labyrinthine meaning.
I couldn't help but see that house as the model for the structure of the novel—otherwise I can't see why it was introduced, and in such detail. The way I understood it, Lina represents the room in the centre of the structure, and by means of her accounts, the reader enters all the other rooms and gets a chance to figure out the message on the frieze. And the mirrors in the central room might symbolize Lina's three friends whose stories are images of each other but with variations.

A piano sonata with its own curious variations gets its first performance in the tower's central room at one point, and it occurred to me that the author might also have seen her novel as resembling a sonata in three variations. If it is so, the main theme that recurs in each of the three variations (which I see as also the message on the frieze) is how horribly women suffer in patriarchal systems such as the one that existed in Colombia in those decades, a system inherited from the Spanish families who settled there in the 18th and 19th centuries. The sonata that is played in the tower room is torn up after its first performance. I saw that as the hope on the part of the author, Marvel Moreno, that patriarchal systems everywhere will also destroyed.

It's an amazing feat of narration no matter what way you look at it. Pages and pages of non-stop telling, including psychological analysis of various characters' personalities and motivations. It reminded me in parts of Proust's 'Recherche du Temps Perdu', not only for how it examined the past but also because of the way Proust's narrator could know details of so many episodes in other peoples' lives which he couldn't necessarily have witnessed. And that there was a sonata at the heart of it was another echo.

At the end of the book there's an epilogue in which Lina speaks to us briefly in her own voice. She says: "Years have passed. I have not returned, nor do I think I will ever return to Barranquilla. No one here [Europe] even knows its name. When they ask me what it's like, I simply say it's by a river, very close to the sea."
I couldn't help feeling that she would not mind if the sea washed Baranquilla, together with its poisonous society, away for ever.

………………

The author Marvel Moreno grew up in Barranquilla in the forties and fifties. She moved to Europe in adulthood and never went back to Columbia. This book was published in Spanish in 1987. Moreno died in 1995.