After a year of waiting, after the appearance of “Violet”her previous book, the Chilean writer Isabel Allende He is back in the news with the publication of his most recent novel, a fiction that goes back to Vienna in 1938, with a Jewish boy as the protagonist. His name is Samuel Adler and his father has mysteriously disappeared during the Night of Broken Glass.
Samuel’s mother, desperate, sends her son to England, hoping to save him from a pitiful fate. Without her, on board a train, the little boy will be forced to give up his childhood, faced with the weight of loneliness and uncertainty, with only a violin, as the most precious memory of that home he has had to leave. back.
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Eighty years later, a seven-year-old girl named Anita travels with her mother on a train that will take them from El Salvador, from where they had to flee for their lives, to the United States. Destination: Arizona.
Their arrival in this alien place coincides with a series of new government policies that will make life miserable for them and other migrants. At the border, before even imagining what her new life could be like, Anita is separated from her mother and she must face, alone and scared, a place that has no intention of welcoming her.
The little girl takes refuge in an imaginary universe that allows her to drive away pain: Azabahar. As she deals with something that no girl her age should face, a young social worker and a lawyer take on her case and try, against all odds, to reunite her with her mother.
Some 352 pages make up “The wind knows my name”, a novel with which Allende seeks to lead the reader to reflect on issues such as uprooting, solidarity, compassion and love, through these two stories that intertwine like two branches of the same tree. A novel about the surprising ability of some children to survive violence without ceasing to dream, says the back cover, and about the tenacity of hope, which can shine even in the darkest moments.
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From the humiliation of Nazi Austria to the ordeal experienced by migrant families at the United States border, the famous Chilean writer goes hand in hand with the reader, going through each of these scenarios on board this story about the deepest wounds. that can mark the body and soul of a person, and how even in the most bleak of moments, light manages to illuminate.
Regarding how this fiction came to be, in a conversation with Vogue México magazine, Allende comments that a few years ago, when he saw a play about the kindertransportan experimental means of transport that was implemented by the government of Great Britain in the 40s and managed to save the lives of nearly 10,000 Jewish children during the Holocaust, the first image of the novel was presented to him and since then he began to investigate about it.
“90% of them never saw their family again. The thought that I could put one of my children alone on a train to an unknown destination, where good people might or might not pick him up, made me wonder: ‘Even if it broke my heart, would I or would I? I would not do it? The truth is that I don’t know,” she noted.
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“The wind knows my name” It is also a return of the author to themes that have occurred to her for several years. In relation to the issue of migration, she herself experienced it when she was forced to leave Chile in 1975 after the coup d’état and the rise to power of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. The writer herself left her native country and settled in Venezuela. The wounds that that experience of hers left her have not yet healed and that is why she, in some way, has also decided to undertake a fiction like this.
“The person who flees seeking refuge is always looking back, towards the past. It’s not a free choice you make, but you’re caught in desperate circumstances, so you don’t adapt. She is left with her half-packed suitcase and the house keys in her pocket, which is what happened to me as a political refugee, ”she recounted in the interview with Vogue Mexico.
Just months after his iconic novel “The House of Spirits” was republished by the publishing group Penguin Random House, in a special and commemorative version (a work that the author also wrote wanting to delve into the issue of migration), Isabel Allende It is the cover again in magazines and newspapers. Now with “The wind knows my name”at 80 years old, her readers will be able to continue confirming why she is one of the most widely read Latin American writers of all time.
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