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For long stretches, it felt like I was sitting on one of those uncomfortable and narrow Ryan Air seats: knees jammed in as a cold voice grinds, with consistent and proven skill honed over the years, the "zebedees" of the unfortunate with a relentless assault of unsolicited advertisements. The funny thing is that this little book with its most uncomfortable newspaper-style layout (double column) and filled with advertisements/random humorous cartoons placed haphazardly, I had to treat with the utmost care because the owner (my brother) promised to break my legs in case of damage. Entering that dark and dusty room in his house is quite impressive: the complete Urania collection alone consists of I don't know how many books (1500/2000??) and some, to protect them from dust, he even covered with a square plastic cover. This is not meticulous care but an illness. A subtle virus that over the years has led him to purchase volumes that he doesn't even open partly because they are not to his liking or because he already read them years ago in other collections that, of course, are also neatly stacked in the "bunker".
The perpetual mess, the paella pot in which I live daily, not only makes me doubt that we have the same father but dangerously reminds me of the obsessive compulsions of a serial killer. This enormous ramble is to say something that I imagine might interest you greatly, like the finale of an episode of "Biutiful", namely that for survival instinct, I flipped through these yellowed and 40-year-old pages as if they were an ancient tome written by aliens concerning the genesis of our little blue dot.
Some days I find that writing here is nice precisely because of this; you can go off on a tangent and talk about useless things just because you want to press the keys and hear the sound; after all, the web is full of people and maybe someone even spends 5 minutes feeding your stupid and ridiculous egocentrism. And so you write like the convoluted driving of a stereotypical girl who to go from point A to point B doesn't choose the shortest and most rational route, but uses up half a tank of gas still claiming to be right. The important thing, though, and I didn’t do it, is not to exaggerate...
Wikipedia reminds me that it's the debut of James Ballard: a disturbing British author that I perused with pleasure in "Concrete Island" and "Empire of the Sun". The long story/sluggish novel I want to talk about today, in my opinion, suffers from a not particularly smooth expositional form perhaps due to inexperience. It's not just an issue of jail-like layout and advertisements: the minimal vocabulary and the chaotic description of scenes give us a misty overview sharpened by the fact that the sparse characters we come into contact with turn out to be rather anonymous and cold. However, all of this takes a back seat because the focus of "The Wind from Nowhere" is not zooming in on the adventures of who and whoever. Ballard gives the characters just enough humanity to differentiate them from robots. More interesting is the nearly philosophical message that emerges while describing a wind that, perhaps following a solar storm, continues to grow in intensity until it reaches unthinkable speeds. This blow will end up crumbling in a few days what humanity has patiently built over centuries, with a single real attempt at resistance/challenge to the phenomenon. "The Wind from Nowhere", and it is precisely this last word of five letters, nowhere, that strikes.
In trying to describe an imaginary catastrophic future Ballard captures with extreme detachment the animalistic and instinctive selfishness of the human race in the face of danger and the simultaneous inability to resist the destructive force of Nature, which almost as a joke, begins to cough animatedly. It is a book imperfect, but very interesting and relevant.
In 1960 the catastrophic genre was in an expansive phase (just consider that this is the first of a series of stories of the same ilk written in sequence by the English author), but its arteries were not yet irreparably clogged. From those years I recommend reading "I Am Legend" by Matheson, in case you are among those who have seen the terrible film. Returning to the object of the review, I greatly appreciated the way the plot was developed; specifically, I find the incipit and the finale brilliant: in sync with the disruptive element, they seem to float in the air, devoid of real foundations. Ballard confronts us with a problem of which one neither knows well how it started nor why and how it ended, exposing the precariousness of our living.
Once I closed the sacred little volume I felt the need to seek out and transcribe a brief sharp, cynical, and Machiavellian phrase capable of capturing the atmosphere I attempted to recount. I leave it to you in beautiful italic duly quoted, asking you to forgive the countless digressions. Now I have to go close the shutters of my house that have been rhythmically banging for a few minutes, in sinister thrall to the wind.
"At this moment begins a form of natural selection, and to put it frankly, I want to be among the selected."
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