The Wind Traveler: A Novel (Latin American Literature in Translation)
Description
The Wind Traveler showcases the mesmerizing storytelling of Alonso Cueto at the top of his career. At the heart of his latest work is a seemingly ordinary man named Ángel, who sells kitchenware at a store in Lima. In the early 1990s, he had served as an army soldier, engaging in brutal acts whose aftermath still reverberates. He is forced to reckon with his past when a woman he was instructed to kill enters the store and buys a few items. How can she still be alive? What's more, how can she not recognize Ángel? Remarkably, she asks him to deliver her purchases to her house. From this moment, Ángel feels compelled to make amends through any means necessary, even if it requires sacrificing his life of quiet retirement.
A stirring tribute to the wounded souls who yearn to make peace with the past, The Wind Traveler offers a new vision of the fragile human connections that sustain a deeply fractured world.
Praise for The Wind Traveler: A Novel (Latin American Literature in Translation)
One of the major novelists of his generation.
— Diario de Tarragona
Each book by the Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto is a journey into our own selves…To read Cueto is to walk those paths of one’s soul that only writers can shine a light on…The Wind Traveler [is a] prodigious novel.
— Santiago Gil
Alonso Cueto records how literature contributes to the definition of our society. The Wind Traveler is simply extraordinary.
— Mariela Sagel
The Wind Traveler is a must-read for its multitude of nuanced ideas, but above all for the changing atmospheres, a spitting image of real life. A novel that will impact any reader.
— Christian Roinat
Staggering...Cueto imbues every page and character with the brutal consequences of war in his compulsively readable story of a man’s reckoning with a history of violence. Wynne and Mendez’s splendid translation brings readers an essential work of Peruvian literature.
— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
The Wind Traveler is a lyrical novel about loss and atonement...Throughout, details capture the essences of places and people. Cueto’s scenes and descriptions are tactile and immediate, conveying subtext and deeper meaning. Metaphors set a mood that supports the story’s overarching themes of trauma, guilt, and the idea that we are forever bound to people we harm and who harm us, even if that harm is unintended...The Wind Traveler is a powerful, multi-layered novel that meditates on life and death, pain and suffering.
— Foreword Reviews
[The Wind Traveler] feels more like two novels. The larger part is rote exercise and bald suspense. Within this, there is a more nuanced, and thus more mesmerizing, consideration of purpose and atonement.
— New York Times
Cueto’s magnificent storytelling ably portrays the brutality of Peru’s armed conflict and, more importantly, the many personal scars it left behind...The Wind Traveler is a fast-paced, psychologically charged novel that quickly grabs the reader’s attention. Translators Frank Wynne and Jessie Méndez Sayer should be commended for their excellent rendition of this gripping narrative. The Wind Traveler will allow English-speaking audiences to learn about Peru’s recent painful past, as well as discover the many talents of one of its best storytellers.
— World Literature Today
[An] accomplished novel by Alonso Cueto, expertly translated by Frank Wynne and Jessie Mendez Sayer.
— Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
