“I Am Here And They Are There” : Wilder Winds By Bel Olid, Translated By Laura McGloughlin

Never judge a book by its cover, so the hackneyed cliché goes. Erroneous assumptions are rather like any form of cognitive bias, they hide in plain sight and in so doing remain dangerously unchallenged. As a callow undergraduate, I recall feeling intimidated by the sheer physical bulk of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, not to mention its only slightly less weighty sibling, The Karamazov Brothers. Don Quixote had a similar affect on my academically deferential sensibilities.

With a heavy book in my hands, I expected these mighty tomes to contain an inestimably vast cornucopia of ideas and themes, conveying me to the sprawling, multi-hued universe gloriously manifest within their plentiful pages. My assumptions were correct, invidiously anointing another false belief. Slim books must necessarily be restricted in both scope and intellectual ambition. Thankfully, that ridiculous thinking left my mind as quickly as the food I naively attempted to store in a shared fridge, its contents religiously plundered by thieves in the night.

Wilder Winds by Catalan based writer and translator Bel Olid is a slim collection of sixteen short stories and runs to a modest seventy-nine pages in length. Translated with interpretive dexterity and sensitive, assiduous care by Laura McGloughlin, Olid’s book is akin to Dr Who’s TARDIS in literary form. Its emotionally charged stories barely contain the pulsating humanistic current electrifying the pages upon which they arc from one to another. These stories are molecular marvels, drawing their explosive visceral power from linguistic compression, employed as a devastatingly powerful form of not nuclear, but literary fusion.

Each pipetted concentrate provides us with an intimate, unflinching glimpse into a protagonist’s defining moment. Sometimes as Proustian memory recalled as an anchor back to the crucible in which nascent identity had first stirred. Other moments drawn from a character’s direct experience of savage political protest, blood-soaked oppression, or courageous revolution. Ranging across Europe and America, these stories are all grounded in the commonality of being the myriad voices of those on the fringes of society, or those whose identity has been cruelly defined by being Sartre’s ‘the other’.

All sixteen tales operate as though a mirror, tilted up to society in order to “reflect humanity” with unflinching honesty. Our protagonists range from a six-year-old witnessing childbirth whilst enduring the horrors of a political siege, through to Baba Luba, a geriatric woman protesting against the callous inhumanity of enemy soldiers crushing resistance in Ukraine.

We have a young woman recalling the day she found a copy of Anne Frank’s Diary on the street as a child, finding solace in its brave entries: “I keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if…only there were no other people”. We hear from an emotionally eviscerated-out wife rejuvenating her sense of self in a bucolic river, and young woman enduring the meaningless poverty and drudge of life without purpose.

Another voice is that of young woman recalling “a tingle in her sex” as she gazes upon her aunt’s naked, wet body as music played softly, bringing her to a madeleine moment – “Since then that music has always had the scent of fruit, of skin like silk, of pending death in the background”. We have an almost Hemingway-like tale resonant of The Old Man and The Sea in which a young girl becomes the protegee of an elderly seamstress. In one story we visit a refugee camp, one young imprisoned, the other free, but both liberated by emotionally activated sexual awakening and mutual, empathetic compassion.

We hear multiple fly-on-the-wall accounts of the 1991 raid on Vilnius when Soviet troops attempted to crush unarmed Lithuanians striving to form an independent republic. In that ruthless act of geopolitical terrorism, a TV station was captured and fourteen innocent civilians murdered. Reading this story now reduced me to tears as shortly after finishing the collection for the third time, history was tragically repeating itself in Kyiv and also Independence Square, the setting for the collection’s loadstone tale, ‘Baba Luba’.

The psychological horror story ‘Windows’, is the only androcentric narrative in the collection. It paints a disturbing portrait of a male pervert imposing his priapic construct of identity upon a young woman he obsessively monitors through his apartment block window. Encapsulating both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, this tale is the only departure Olid takes from letting us hear of, and from women struggling to become fully realised, authentic Beings.

Thematically, ut supra, the stories confront the notion of authentic, unfettered identity, omnipresent repression of both desire and liberty. They examine the flagrant and subtle abuse of power, the precarious reality of being a woman irrespective of context and the longing for a sense of meaning and belonging. Events carry these themes as semiotic cyphers, but they gain their potency and ineluctable emotional resonance by dint of our protagonist’s graphic displays of both trauma, and tenderness.

Spliced through the bone-dry, unsentimental, overtly feminist exploration of dirty truths such as sexism, racism and cold-hearted oppression, hope shimmers and salts our diet of woe with gloriously cathartic moments of heroism and uncorrupted love.

I began this review by celebrating the sheer force of Olid’s slight collection, the fierce, fiery force of the succinct, beautifully angry prose. Olid has used the sensitivity of a poet and the technical bravura of truly gifted storyteller to invest these stories with raw, visceral power; the technical dexterity had me falling off my chair !

We see deftly executed first and third-person point of view narrations always being in media res but never failing to attain a fully realised denouement, complete of and in itself. We see characters become ‘round’, never ‘flat’, tangibly alive across the course of less than two pages. Dirty Realism fuses with quasi-dystopian Science Fiction and carefully modulated impressionistic Stream of Consciousness. Olid's synaesthetic prose recalibrates our own senses, drawing its force from skilfully made metaphor and bold use of iterative imagery. Water, blood, the human body and memory are all used both as theme baring symbols and syncopated drumbeats loading the prose with its urgent rhythms and undeniable vitality.

What struck me was Olid’s ability to pivot from the bucolic prose of Margarita Liberaki, to the concentrated efficiency of Hemingway, and then shove my face in the realism of Honoré de Balzac! My references are not drawn from the sources I suspect have acted upon this writer’s mind, for my knowledge of Catalan’s literary history is shamefully poor. That said, I cite these authors in a desperate attempt to convey the astonishing breadth of Olid’s technical prowess. I strongly suspect Olid does not have a traditional authorial voice, employing any tongue or style and inhabit it with virtuosic legerdemain.

For me, the only story not deserving its place in this outstanding collection was ‘Linda’. A young woman shoots two males dead in response to their catcalls and catalyses the brave indignation of other women in Spain and America. Though the theme deserves attention, Olid utilises a tendentious foghorn to make the point, leaving no room for indeterminacy and therefore the reader’s own judgment. In all of the other gems within this gritty, but life-affirming book, our author’s hand is an evanescent agent, however in this one it’s so conspicuous as to be deleterious to their objectives.

This criticism notwithstanding, let me make my perhaps ossified point clear. Wilder Winds is a scintillating collection of beautifully ugly truths, and whilst it denounces much, it also celebrates what it means to be a fully realised, autonomous human being. If you seek a small book packing an enormous, intellectual and emotional punch, look no further. Sartre told us that “Hell is other people”, but with Olid at the wheel I’ll gladly meet them all !


Wilder Winds is published by Fum D’Estampa Press