Other Winds Will Blow (Soplarán otros vientos) (2019)
Alfonso Carvajal (1950)
Illustrations by Alicia Carvajal
175 pages
After retiring in 2015 as a professor from the University of Valladolid in Spain, Alfonso Carvajal returned to his hometown El Toboso, in La Mancha, southeast of Madrid – a town and a region made famous by the Miguel Cervantes novel Don Quixote. Once back, and with time on his hands, Carvajal wrote and submitted an essay to the regional newspaper. As he notes in the introduction to his collection Other Winds Will Blow (Soplarán otros vientos), “good luck did the rest” (“el buen azar hizo el resto”): the essay was accepted and published by the newspaper, and more pieces followed as he embraced this new pursuit.
Though his themes range from politics to culture to the natural world, he consistently rises above dry, esoteric observations in his essays, instead animating and enriching them with a healthy dose of his personal experiences. They fairly crackle with a sense of his broad engagement with the world and his profound passion for how we can best live our lives.
This shines through perhaps most notably in pieces that reflect on his emotional influences. In The Bars of My Town, for example, he explores the central role bars play in small towns in Spain, describing the different types typically present. But the piece really comes alive as he then goes on to explore the smells and sounds that create the unique atmosphere that brings him and others back repeatedly to their same haunts – and he celebrates the sense of community that results.
A similar emotional resonance fills The Sentimental Education, in which he provides a kind of greatest hits guide to the music, radio programs and concerts that have accompanied him from one stage of his life to the next. So much more than a personal favorites list, however, he transforms this recollection into a meditation on the central role music plays for so many of us in our lives.
Roughly half of the essays address political topics, to which Carvajal brings a sense of the fundamental importance of fairness and decency. Whether writing about ossified traditions of petty corruption that too often go unchallenged among local government officials, the thorny issue of Catalonian independence, or a globe-spanning topic such as the handling of people’s personal data, he brings a measured tone, deeply informed by his experience, learning and abiding sense of humanity.
These traits also characterize his essays on the natural world and our place in it. Here, beyond an homage to Thoreau, he engages with several challenges tied closely to the seemingly inevitable – and destructive – outcomes of our modern economic system. Thus, for example, he highlights the problems created by the privatization of water access and, in several essays, the profound impact of transportation systems on the natural world, including the months-long uncontrollable fires of vast dumps of used tires that became a major air and water quality crisis in Spain just a few years ago.
In a present-day world in which the mix of partisan divisions and social media has led to public exchanges that too often descend into toxic screaming matches, Alfonso Carvajal’s essays provide a measure of solace. Thoughtful and uplifting, they remind us of the beauty to be found in both the natural world and our relations with one another. And, when he does write of the challenges we yet face to make the world a better, more livable place, he does so with nuance and a sense of hope for the future that can inspire a reader to themselves engage in making this happen.
Other notes and information:
The book contains a beautiful series of abstract paintings by Alicia Carvajal.
Unfortunately, these essays have not yet been translated into English.
All translations to English in this review are my own
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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