December Breeze

Rather shamefully, I hadn't heard of Marvel Moreno before reading this: and what a gap in my reading! There's something of the classics here in terms of her literary aesthetics: Proust's reconstruction of a past through memory; Woolf's close third person (more like Mrs Dalloway than To the Lighthouse); Marquez's renewal of the family saga narrative that stretches through time. But Moreno makes this all her own.

Divided into three sections, each essentially tells a lineage story of three young women: Dora, Catalina and Beatriz, all friends of the distanced narrator (who doesn't appear in her own voice until the epilogue), Lina. And this is very much a story about women: Lina and her peers, their mothers and aunts, their daughters occasionally - and the men who desire oppress and try to subjugate them... with varying levels of success!

But this is not a man-hating narrative: there's much compassion for the ways in which patriarchy moulds and distorts masculinity, though Moreno equally doesn't let her male characters off the hook for their choices.

Most of all, there is a kind of exuberance in the writing, even when the content is violent and oppressive. There's something deliciously unexpected, even a bit subversive, about Moreno's prose, and a fluidity about her narrative which flows easily between the female characters. Full of a fierce fight-back against generations of misogyny and toxic masculinity, this is powerful and written in an unusual style that gives it both intimacy and objectivity.

Moreno takes issue with Christianity and the bible as ultimate forms of patriarchal authority and the way that sexuality is circumscribed, but she does it with a sardonic wit that keeps the story buoyant even in the face of some very dark episodes. With a wide lens that takes in Columbia's colonial past, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and the plight of Jews during the Holocaust and beyond it, this is deeply embedded in twentieth century history yet remains, on balance, positive.

Most of all, the characters - despite them never speaking directly, only via Lina's 'telling' - are vibrant and distinctive with a colour that feels special: I loved this!

Many thanks to Europa Editions for bringing Morena to English-speaking readers with this subtle and smooth translation.