Powerful & Moving Shorts
Review of the Fum d'Estampa paperback (January 2022) translated by Laura McGloughlin from the Catalan language original "Els vents més salvatges" (March 2016)

I'll declare my bias immediately that due to my own Baltic Estonian heritage my rating is motivated by this book having stories related to several national independence movements or peoples' uprisings. In microcosm, the other stories have the same resonance, with their tales of individual coming of age, childhood struggles, sexual awakening, relationship issues, women's identity, immigration and refugees.

The stories and the book are short, 16 stories in 79 pages, but it is all the more impactful for that. I did notice that the Catalan original is 144* pages, but all 16 original stories are translated in this English language edition, so the difference must be due to spacing. The Fum d'Estampa Press edition is tightly packed, without blank separating pages between stories.

Story synopses:
1. She's A Woman A young girl/woman has encounters in a household where she is temporarily staying with her aunt which influence her perceptions of life forever after.
2. Static A young woman drives to her mother's birthday while remembering the comfort that the white noise of early onscreen TV screen static gave to her in childhood.
3. Sea of Maimunà A young girl travels along with her aunt, who volunteers at a refugee camp whose inhabitants live in shipping containers. She makes friends with a refugee girl named Maimunà.
4. Anna, Anne, Anna A woman remembers her childhood and her attachment to an abandoned tattered copy of The Diary of Anne Frank which she picked up off the street. Her mother told her "That book is for adults... Don't read it anymore." After her mother throws the book away, even later in life when she could have obtained another copy, instead:

But I preferred not to. There are memories that shine like a brand-new coin on the pavement when touched by the midday sun and you, walking with your head bowed and looking at the ground, wake up suddenly, pick it up and feel you are very lucky. That, I still carry in my pocket.

5. Baba Luba (Ukrainian: Granny Luba). An older woman joins the protesters of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution (2004/05) at the Maidan (Independence Square) while carrying a mirror to reflect the images of the regime's enforcement troops back on to themselves.
6. Windows A woman becomes obsessed with observing a neighbour through her windows.
7. Red While scavenging for food in the midst of an unidentified city's wartime siege, a young girl becomes fixated by the scene of a woman giving birth in the ruins.
8. Wild Flowers Gabriela travels to an isolated rural house left to her by her grandmother where she paints and gathers flowers. She returns to Lisbon where she meets her partner Arnaldo in the midst of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution (1974).
9. Sybille The protagonist becomes an apprentice to a shoemaker named Sybille, and in turn seeks to mentor their own successor.
10. Plus Ultra Probably the most difficult story to define and understand. Appears to be a science fiction tale of a future world where most of humanity has been eradicated by the immortal survivors who gather frozen relics of life.
11. Linda Vignettes of three women in reaction to cat-calling on the street.
12. Invisible The protagonist travels (while fare-jumping) from their room to their factory job in a warehouse district and thinks about the "city where every day so many people live without living."
13. Three A woman looks back on her life and her own three children after she has retired from her job as a supervisor in a prison nursery where the children of inmates are sent away for adoption when they turn the age of three.
14. Sand Through Her Fingers A woman takes a teaching job to language/learning challenged children (possibly refugee children?) at a beach town away from her own family. She swims at the beach in her free time and lets the sand run through her fingers while remembering her own childhood.
15. Cabaret In an interview, a woman laments her life after being required to lose weight after a heart attack.
16. Dainuojanti Revoliucija (Lithuanian: Singing Revolution) Vignettes of several of the martyr families and some participants of the Lithuanian Singing Revolution (1987-1991) in the Baltic States. Specifically the events of Bloody Sunday January 13, 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

I read Wilder Winds as the December 2021 selection from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month (BotM) club. Subscriptions to the BotM support the annual Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers.

Trivia and Links
* You can examine an excerpt from the original Catalan edition including its index page at the publisher Editorial Empúries' site here.

If you are reading this before January 20, 2022 you can still register for the (free) book release event for Wilder Winds organized by Fum d'Estampa Press and October Books on Eventbrite here.

As far as I can determine, Wilder Winds is the first published English language translation of a work by Bel Olid, but there is another one coming up very shortly, the non-fiction based "Hairless: Breaking the Vicious Circle of Hair Removal, Submission and Self-Hatred" (expected publication May 2022), also translated by Laura McGloughlin from the Catalan language original "A contrapelo. O por qué romper el círculo de depilación, sumisión y autoodio" (November 2020). ( )

Totes les paraules necessàries i cap paraula sobrera. Lliscant, acompanyant. No tant sacsejador que l'anterior i molt més reconfortant... en general. ( )