LET THE WIND SPEAK

Let The Wind Speak ($15.99 paperback original; Jan. 1997; 288 pp.; 1-85242-196-7): A 1979 novel by the great Uruguayan author (190994) whose most celebrated books include The Shipyard (1968) and A Brief Life (1976). Like them, this is a brooding, claustrophobically intense portrayal of its protagonist's alienation from his past life (in the December 1, 1996 FICTION/MYSTERY# evocatively named town—Santa Maria—from which he has been exiled) and from the women and others he claims to have loved and not forgotten. The character of Medina (``the chief of police who wanted to be God''), a deracinated loner whose life has taken various other occupational as well as emotional forms, is observed in rare depth, both by the man himself and by the omniscient author, in a complex analysis of the condition of separation and solitude that is a tour de force. . . .