In December Breeze, Moreno, an associate of García Márquez and the famed “Barranquilla Group,” delivers a stinging indictment of the oppressive situation facing women in that Colombian coastal city in the 1950s.

The award winning story is told from the point of view of Lina, now an ex-pat in Paris, as she looks back on life in her hometown with incredible insight. This narration style draws similarities with Proust's reconstruction of a past through memory and Woolf's close third person descriptives, and it works perfectly here.

The novel focuses on the experiences of three young women, Dora, Catalina, and Beatriz and their close female relatives, exposing the city's sexual violence, misogyny, classism, and racism in sharp and unrelenting detail.

Railroaded or goaded into marriages and relationships that rarely served to benefit their own sexual or financial interests, the three women experience varying degrees of disenchantment or outright self-destruction in the process.

Lina, whose life experiences echo some of Moreno’s own, relates the advice and admonitions dispensed by a chorus of older women, her aunts and a grandmother, who have seen all the harm done by generations of men gone before.

Yet this is not a man-hating narrative: there's compassion for how the patriarchy also moulds and distorts masculinity, though Moreno equally doesn't let her male characters use this to excuse their choices.

Each young woman’s story is told with elaborate attention to her history and lineage and those of the men who ensnare and coax her into nightmarish alliances.

It’s not an easy read, and patience is required to discern the interlocking web of family and professional connections within the provincial city, and the detail with which Moreno traces who wound up where, when, and with whom can be daunting but take your time as the journey is well worth it.

Excellently translated, Moreno’s dense and meandering prose depicts a litany of suffering layered upon suffering.

Reminiscent of Elena Ferrante, her fans are bound to love this hard hitting, beautifully constructed novel 4.5⭐️

I’d like to liken the feeling of reading “December Breeze” by Marvel Moreno to a feminine version of works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but such views would be too simplistic. Compared to Gabo, Moreno is less well-known in the English-speaking world. “December Breeze” was not translated into English until 2022, when this translation by Isabel Adey and Charlotte Coombe brought due recognition to Moreno. Stylistically, I immediately noticed elements similar to Gabo’s works such as long paragraphs, few conversations between characters, the length of the story that spans several generations, and elements of magical realism. What distinguishes Moreno in this story is the setting – Barranquilla, a port city in the northern part of Colombia, where Moreno’s traditional wealthy family resided.

In addition to magical realism, “December Breeze” brings about elements of dazzling realities. Moreno’s characters philosophise at the beginning of each chapter, sometimes to the point of criticising the philosophies of her time. One particular scene that stays in my head is when one character called Beatriz spends her time idling at home reading “The Second Sex” – a seminal work on feminism – that fills the gap in her activities. Yet as Beatriz reads it, she comes to realise how her life and previous intellectual pursuit have been reduced to the role of a housewife tending to the needs of her husband and children, as well as fulfilling the expectations of her and her husband’s influential families. Her realisation brings her to reassess as well how despite modern life liberating women – in terms of empowering them with choices with regards to work and sexual life – there exist some shortcomings in the way her life is still turned upside down due to that very liberty. She got raped and thus brought into her complex situation.

I see “December Breeze”, with its complexity, as a novel about liberating oneself from one’s undesirable situation. Each character has their own share of undesirable situations, from forced marriages into uneasy social standings, from female characters seeking to liberate themselves from the tyranny of patriarchy to wealthy individuals seeking redemption by becoming communists. They find ways to navigate the oppression surrounding them (and sometimes, overcome them).

<i>I think about the world our grandmothers left behind, where patios bloomed with vines and daguerreotypes faded on the walls of bedrooms.</i>

This book is INCREDIBLE. Absolutely amazing. It is LONG, though - with long sentences. It is never confusing, though. It must have taken ages to translate (congratulations to the translators!). It is such a pleasure to read - incredible use of the third person, and wonderful García Márquez like-tone (the Faulkner vibes here are SOOO strong). The style is fucking incredible and the #1 reason to admire the book. In terms of themes, it is incredibly, remarkably observant on the influence of racism in Colombian society. And I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE its focus on women. A big theme in the book is sex, danger, desire, and control. A lot of the pleasure of reading comes from the random asides - the loooong digressions about other characters. The final ending scene is so fucking good, absolutely incredible - best ending to a book I've read in years.

I recommend this book to any fan of Colombian literature. Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

<i>Years have passed. I have not returned, nor do I think i will ever return to Barranquilla. No one here even knows its name. When they ask me what it's like, I simply say that it's by a river, very close to the sea.</i>

3.75 ⭐

translated from spanish language and this novel carried the story of columbian women's life in 1950s. ouh how i love to read stories that explored on women. slide to the next picture for the synopsis.

✏️writings: it is a high level prose to me. the prose matched to classics novel to me. it is lyrical, beautiful and complex in terms of prose structure. so you gotta give a full attention or else you will lost in the sea of words ✨. the writings are quite lengthy and yes it will tested your patience but it is worthy to do so. to me, it was balanced with the plot. the pace is def a slow one as they want you to consume the sufferings faced by these women.

📖 the plot: there are 3 story with one POV. 3 different women who lived their life as woman are challenged. their womenhood, class and tradition are all provoked by their partner called men. the characters also were explained with details on each of characters got their life narrations. from childhood to adult. as if writer wants to consider men characters to be sympathetic villains. i felt like unecessary for me to go further details on men if we want to upheld women's injustice theme.

📚 themes : mostly, i can see it attentively focused on se*ual liberation & se*ual abuse on women. it touched a lot on women's marriage life and how they were treated as per partriarchy system and a lot of misogynistic theme involved. "women should bear children & stay home only." i am unsure about how columbian men was before this but i am pretty sure it was the same to almost all men in 50s. there are a lot of triggered warnings too such as domestic abuse and marital rape.it didn't shy away in portraying how men mistreated their wife and some scene are quite graphic. nothing is beautiful here because everything is depressed shit.

overall: it is a heavy read as every man in this book is ⛳. the sufferings, challenges, life of these women in this book deserve way better for their life. the injustices were shown are depicted horribly ugly, mentally & physically exhausted.

What an interesting read! The relationship between the women in that space (Colombia) and time (the 50 and 60’s) were very interesting and different from what you usually read. I find Latin American writers have a very different voice that tends to work very well for me and Marvel Moreno has joined that list.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to find such a wonderful writer.

Rather shamefully, I hadn't heard of Marvel Moreno before reading this: and what a gap in my reading! There's something of the classics here in terms of her literary aesthetics: Proust's reconstruction of a past through memory; Woolf's close third person (more like Mrs Dalloway than To the Lighthouse); Marquez's renewal of the family saga narrative that stretches through time. But Moreno makes this all her own.

Divided into three sections, each essentially tells a lineage story of three young women: Dora, Catalina and Beatriz, all friends of the distanced narrator (who doesn't appear in her own voice until the epilogue), Lina. And this is very much a story about women: Lina and her peers, their mothers and aunts, their daughters occasionally - and the men who desire oppress and try to subjugate them... with varying levels of success!

But this is not a man-hating narrative: there's much compassion for the ways in which patriarchy moulds and distorts masculinity, though Moreno equally doesn't let her male characters off the hook for their choices.

Most of all, there is a kind of exuberance in the writing, even when the content is violent and oppressive. There's something deliciously unexpected, even a bit subversive, about Moreno's prose, and a fluidity about her narrative which flows easily between the female characters. Full of a fierce fight-back against generations of misogyny and toxic masculinity, this is powerful and written in an unusual style that gives it both intimacy and objectivity.

Moreno takes issue with Christianity and the bible as ultimate forms of patriarchal authority and the way that sexuality is circumscribed, but she does it with a sardonic wit that keeps the story buoyant even in the face of some very dark episodes. With a wide lens that takes in Columbia's colonial past, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and the plight of Jews during the Holocaust and beyond it, this is deeply embedded in twentieth century history yet remains, on balance, positive.

Most of all, the characters - despite them never speaking directly, only via Lina's 'telling' - are vibrant and distinctive with a colour that feels special: I loved this!

Many thanks to Europa Editions for bringing Morena to English-speaking readers with this subtle and smooth translation.

This is a difficult book to review. It had moments of poetry and an interesting thread of female violence and madness running throughout. I found the language wordy and too descriptive. Sometimes this worked but most of the time I got lost in the long sentences.

A wonderfully written and sensually feminist novel. Lina recalls the story of three women from her home in Paris. We are brought through the city of Barranquilla, Colombia and witness to the patriarchal violence that takes place within.

A story on sex, femininity, violence, toxic masculinity, machoism and class. It’s hard to say this story is enjoyable as there were some really graphic and violent moments throughout but I enjoyed the characters and thought it was well written.

I have a feeling that this book was not right for me. I have a feeling that you have to be from a more passionate culture to understand it properly.

All I know is that this is one of the most densely worded novels I've read in a long time. The layout was daunting enough but the cast of characters, even more so. To say this is a book about three women's histories is to leave out perhaps two thirds of what is written.

We start with Dora who is used and abused. We move on to Catalina who suffers the same fate and finally Beatriz who is the third member of these women for whom life is made up of disappointment.

This was described as a feminist novel. Now I've never been clear on what constitutes a feminist novel but in this case it appears to be the women enjoying their own sexuality, getting castigated for it in various forms (both mental and physical abuse) then going on to either seek revenge on the men who abuse them or to succumb to their despair.

I've always been under the impression that feminism meant equality of the sexes but this book seems to only deal with women having equal amounts of fun during sex. Then again, they all seem to suffer for enjoying it afterward.

Hence my first observation that I think I'm from the wrong culture because I truly didn't understand the women's submissiveness, the men's brutality or the part society played - which seemed to condone both behaviours.

Either way, it's a really tiring book to read. I did finish it but I was glad in the end that it was over.

Stunning.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read this book in exchange for my review.

Thank you to Netgalley and Europa Editions for a copy of this book.

This was originally published in Spanish in 1987. Translation by Isabel Adey and Charlotte Coombe.

Lina, now living in Paris tells the story of three women, Dora, Catalina and Beatriz from her past in Barranquilla, Colombia. Their world is violent and patriarchal.

I found I could not get into this story at all as I did like Moreno's writing style. Her sentences were were unnecessarily long (nearly half a page at time) and complex. We see a large number of character in this narrative, but we don't really get to know any of them.

This is described as a feminist book, but that seems questionable to me since it contains a rape sex that is so detailed it seems gratuitous. I also did not appreciate Moreno's treatment of homosexuality.

This seems to be a highly popular book, but I don't understand the hype, I hated it more and more as I read it.