THE WINDS OF MARACAIBO

Venezuela’s economic collapse fragments a family seeking safety beyond its borders.

Morán’s second novel (and first in English translation) is set in 2018, as the death of President Hugo Chávez and the rise of Nicolás Maduro has sent the nation’s economy into a tailspin: “Inflation was at 130,060 percent. A basic trip to the grocery store cost 220 times the minimum wage,” she writes. That prompts a young woman, Nina Gutiérrez, to leave her mother, Graciela, and daughter, Elisa, back in their home city of Maracaibo and head for Porto Alegre, Brazil, seeking a better life. The trip is an ordeal: Contempt for immigrants runs deep (arsonists set her migrant camp ablaze) and work is scarce, prompting her to squat in a university storage room and scare up housecleaning work. Meanwhile, Nina’s estranged ex-husband, Camilo, has arrived to take Elisa to Houston, where his well-off parents live, and start fresh in America. (Both Nina and Camilo were committed socialists during the Chavez years, but Camilo’s wealth and Nina’s relative poverty became a point of tension.) Nina’s and Elisa’s fates are central to the story’s conflict, as their distance extends across two continents, but the narrative cycles through the perspectives of multiple characters, including Nina’s father, Raúl, recently deceased and speaking from a kind of purgatory that echoes the country’s own precarious position. Though writing out of Venezuela is rare for American audiences, Morán’s perspective on migration will resonate with readers familiar with themes of separation, asylum, bigotry, and resettling. What distinguishes the novel is Morán’s ability to write in a variety of tones (ably captured by translator Jones) and her evocation of the desperation that fills migrants from different generations and class levels in different ways, and how skills and money are of little use, even when they’re trying “to start over in a city where Venezuelans weren’t yet regarded as a pest.”

A taut, poignant snapshot of migration.