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Lady of the South Wind
From his new home in the sanitarium, Hans Kruger confesses his dangerously consuming love for Olga Dittersdorf to a friend, spinning a frightening tale of obsession and fatal attraction that led to violence
221 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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About the author
Javier García Sánchez
48 books8 followersJavier García Sánchez (Barcelona, 1955) ha publicado las siguientes obras de ficción: novelas cortas: La hija del emperador, El amor secreto de Luca Signorelli, Recuerda y Los otros; volúmenes de relatos: Mutantes de invierno, Teoría de la eternidad y Crítica de la Razón impura; novelas: Continúa el misterio de los ojos verdes, Ultima carta de amor de Carolina von Günderrode a Bettina Brentano, El mecanógrafo y La historia más triste, por la que obtuvo el IX Premio Herralde de Novela. La Dama del Viento Sur, reconocida como una de las obras capitales de la narrativa de los años ochenta, fue publicada en Estados Unidos con notable éxito de crítica.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 24, 2023
Lo que me ha costado terminar este libro no está escrito. Y el final ni lo valió.
December 12, 2025
Muy repetitivo, muy espeso, no avanza nada. Uff.
August 22, 2011
Here is my April 1990 review from the San Francisco Chronicle:
LADY OF THE SOUTH WIND
By Javier Garcia Sanchez, translated by Michael Bradburn Ruster, Myrna R. Villa
North Point; 221 pages; $ 19.95
Nobody ever said that reading a great book had to be easy. Making it through this tortuous, brilliant novel of obsessive love can't help but leave a reader agitated and drained -- and alive with thought and feeling.
A measure of Javier Garcia Sanchez's success in making the unspeakable yearning of one character (Hans) for another (Olga) real to the reader comes midway through ''Lady of the South Wind,'' which was a critical and commercial success in Spain when it was first published in 1985. Hans has already spent untold pages explaining to his friend Andreas (who unobtrusively narrates the novel) the course of what happened in his relationship, if you can call it that, with Olga. She works with them at an explosives firm but lives with a man, leaving Hans only a small amount of room at the margins of her life.
His enchantment soon grows into a ''gigantic monster,'' forcing him to spend time at a sanatorium, where Andreas visits him. They go for a long walk and Hans does all the talking, filling page after page with his thoughts on Olga. ''The more I think I should forget that face, the more its smiling image haunts me. And the same thing happens when I think about her telling me, in reference to our relationship and its presumed ending . . . 'It would be very sad the end of something never begun.' ''
Olga's voice, simple and direct, cuts through the convoluted fury of Hans' thoughts; it captures everything, and by doing so validates everything. Still, this is no ''Ulysses.'' The voice of Hans, which delineates in dizzying detail the topography of his love for Olga, never really yields to the affirmation and counterpoint of Olga's voice. Garcia Sanchez, in other words, does not try to shirk the sense that so obsessive a love is also a possessive love, a love that stifles and suffocates. His willingness to plunge so unashamedly into the center of that truth is the triumph of this courageous, masochistic book.
He wants readers to struggle for air. Unrelenting suffocation is more than a metaphor, it's a key theme of a book more concerned with theme than plot. That's probably why he inflicts on readers an incredibly lucid and expansive 177-page monologue that does not afford even the respite of a paragraph break.
The point isn't so much to get to know these people, although Garcia Sanchez's abundant skill makes it inevitable that telling details rain down. Hans, an intelligent and good-looking man in his 30s, thinks too much, as Olga likes to tell him; he is the sort of person who is soothed by clocks, storms and the sight of old people rummaging through garbage cans.
In the long musings Hans shares with Andreas, he works his way around to accusing himself of not really having loved Olga, but rather of having thought of loving her. He's onto something. The details of who Olga is never matter as much as the way his thoughts circle his ideas of her. This is a love no one would confuse with the love one has for a person one lives with, side by side, through days and years.
'' 'To ingest no food whatsoever for so many days was an irrational, a totally infantile attitude, I know that, but one I was compelled to adopt in order to externalize my desperation. Yes,' Hans said, 'because it was with desperation that I observed that the sole thing in my life I didn't do out of inertia was to love Olga.' ''
Any good book subjects a reader to a loss of self, but usually the world into which one slips has some texture, some humanity. Hans' world is one of echoing words and genuine insights that he really knows nothing about what happened with Olga.
This he understands, though, and he explains to Andreas that his ability to know is so eviscerated that he finds it impossible to ''remember whether the central part of an egg was white or yellow.'' What comes through, instead of understanding, is a flood of vividness and truth that is not any less compelling for the fact that it adds up to nothing.
Hans somehow sees his potent, doomed love for Olga as an antidote to the inertia he sees ruling others' lives. His love for Olga, a woman who never really lets him in, becomes a kind of existential victory. They meet for late nights of drinks and talking. He writes her passionate letters and asks her questions, and she comes to see him as representing possibility, the possibility of her veering into a different life, one she quietly craves. His pain is to know he exists for her as a catalyst that can never show its power.
LADY OF THE SOUTH WIND
By Javier Garcia Sanchez, translated by Michael Bradburn Ruster, Myrna R. Villa
North Point; 221 pages; $ 19.95
Nobody ever said that reading a great book had to be easy. Making it through this tortuous, brilliant novel of obsessive love can't help but leave a reader agitated and drained -- and alive with thought and feeling.
A measure of Javier Garcia Sanchez's success in making the unspeakable yearning of one character (Hans) for another (Olga) real to the reader comes midway through ''Lady of the South Wind,'' which was a critical and commercial success in Spain when it was first published in 1985. Hans has already spent untold pages explaining to his friend Andreas (who unobtrusively narrates the novel) the course of what happened in his relationship, if you can call it that, with Olga. She works with them at an explosives firm but lives with a man, leaving Hans only a small amount of room at the margins of her life.
His enchantment soon grows into a ''gigantic monster,'' forcing him to spend time at a sanatorium, where Andreas visits him. They go for a long walk and Hans does all the talking, filling page after page with his thoughts on Olga. ''The more I think I should forget that face, the more its smiling image haunts me. And the same thing happens when I think about her telling me, in reference to our relationship and its presumed ending . . . 'It would be very sad the end of something never begun.' ''
Olga's voice, simple and direct, cuts through the convoluted fury of Hans' thoughts; it captures everything, and by doing so validates everything. Still, this is no ''Ulysses.'' The voice of Hans, which delineates in dizzying detail the topography of his love for Olga, never really yields to the affirmation and counterpoint of Olga's voice. Garcia Sanchez, in other words, does not try to shirk the sense that so obsessive a love is also a possessive love, a love that stifles and suffocates. His willingness to plunge so unashamedly into the center of that truth is the triumph of this courageous, masochistic book.
He wants readers to struggle for air. Unrelenting suffocation is more than a metaphor, it's a key theme of a book more concerned with theme than plot. That's probably why he inflicts on readers an incredibly lucid and expansive 177-page monologue that does not afford even the respite of a paragraph break.
The point isn't so much to get to know these people, although Garcia Sanchez's abundant skill makes it inevitable that telling details rain down. Hans, an intelligent and good-looking man in his 30s, thinks too much, as Olga likes to tell him; he is the sort of person who is soothed by clocks, storms and the sight of old people rummaging through garbage cans.
In the long musings Hans shares with Andreas, he works his way around to accusing himself of not really having loved Olga, but rather of having thought of loving her. He's onto something. The details of who Olga is never matter as much as the way his thoughts circle his ideas of her. This is a love no one would confuse with the love one has for a person one lives with, side by side, through days and years.
'' 'To ingest no food whatsoever for so many days was an irrational, a totally infantile attitude, I know that, but one I was compelled to adopt in order to externalize my desperation. Yes,' Hans said, 'because it was with desperation that I observed that the sole thing in my life I didn't do out of inertia was to love Olga.' ''
Any good book subjects a reader to a loss of self, but usually the world into which one slips has some texture, some humanity. Hans' world is one of echoing words and genuine insights that he really knows nothing about what happened with Olga.
This he understands, though, and he explains to Andreas that his ability to know is so eviscerated that he finds it impossible to ''remember whether the central part of an egg was white or yellow.'' What comes through, instead of understanding, is a flood of vividness and truth that is not any less compelling for the fact that it adds up to nothing.
Hans somehow sees his potent, doomed love for Olga as an antidote to the inertia he sees ruling others' lives. His love for Olga, a woman who never really lets him in, becomes a kind of existential victory. They meet for late nights of drinks and talking. He writes her passionate letters and asks her questions, and she comes to see him as representing possibility, the possibility of her veering into a different life, one she quietly craves. His pain is to know he exists for her as a catalyst that can never show its power.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews