Beyond the Winds

Beyond the Winds is the story of two long trips from the Americas to East Asia. Separated by 400 years, two neighbors of the city of Lima travel to Indochina and see themselves in the waters of the Mekong River. As it happens when we look at a mirror, the image that returns is not an answer, but a question: Who are you? What brought you here? Where are you going? These contemplations engage our two stories, which though distant in time, are rooted in the same feelings of estrangement and nostalgia, and of surprising historical parallels. One of them, Blas Ruiz, a real-life 16th Century adventurer, sets sail from the Viceroyalty of Peru seeking for fortune and to expand the Spanish empire; the other, an unnamed professional follows his own steps (and Blas Ruiz’s) in supervising a dam project in Laos or, perhaps, to recover the child that, when fourteen, received from his mother a book of Somerset Maugham and thus imagined the Orient.

The novel combines two genres: the historical novel, and a mix of auto-fiction and travel stories marked by an intimate confessional tone. Through this double approximation and the encounter of cultures, it narrates the travelers’ continuous reflections, addressing the tension between East and West, capitalism and communism, secularism and religion, and between nature and human intervention. But there are no answers in Beyond the Winds. The novel does not lecture but questions, aiming to dwell its thoughts in the reader.