"The rose that is destroyed in the wind lets its petals fly in a burned light," says this hallucinatory novel by Sara Gallardo, her latest publication, an extraordinary culmination for a dazzling, always precise, always unique, always captivating body of work. In La rosa en el viento, all the characters move, embarking on journeys that are sometimes physical and sometimes emotional, but in every case, they take them far from whom they were at the beginning. Olaf, a Swedish immigrant who has escaped a terrible episode in Italy, becomes a sheep breeder in Patagonia alongside Andrei, a Russian journalist who, in turn, seeks to win over an unconquerable woman, whose story reaches us in flashes, much like that of Oo, the Indian woman bought by Andrei, or Lina, who follows Andrei south, and Olga, who two generations earlier followed Alexis the revolutionary to an America that, for these characters, is both a land of promises and forgotten dreams that never truly materialize. Kaleidoscopic, polyphonic, synthetic, and modern, La rosa en el viento brings together all of Sara Gallardo's talent for storytelling and emotional impact, and it demands that we read it again.
