I cannot resist the analogy of this title to present my story «dust in the wind«, With the sound, in the background, of the homonymous song of Kansas. That Leonard Padura forgive me ...
The final question is that such a title, whether for a song or for a book, points to transience, to the merciless sensation of our expendable condition, of our ephemeral being.
The day starts off badly for Adela, a young New Yorker of Cuban descent, when she receives a call from her mother. They have been angry for more than a year, because Adela has not only moved to Miami, but lives with Marcos, a young Havanan recently arrived in the United States who has completely seduced her and whom, because of his origin, her mother rejects.
Marcos tells Adela stories of his childhood on the island, surrounded by a group of his parents' friends called the Clan, and shows her a photo of the last meal when, as a child, they were together twenty-five years ago. Adela, who sensed that the day was going to turn, discovers someone familiar between their faces. And an abyss opens under his feet.
Like dust in the wind is the story of a group of friends who have survived a fate of exile and dispersal, in Barcelona, in the extreme northwest of the United States, in Madrid, in Puerto Rico, in Buenos Aires ... What has life done with them, that they had loved each other so much? What happened to those who left and those who decided to stay? How has the weather changed them? Will the magnetism of the feeling of belonging, the strength of the affections, reunite them? Or are their lives already dust in the wind?
In the trauma of the diaspora and the disintegration of ties, this novel is also a hymn to friendship, to the invisible and powerful threads of love and old loyalties. A dazzling novel, a moving human portrait, another masterpiece by Leonardo Padura.
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