Unfortunately I had to DNF as after reading many chapters I just couldn’t get into the story.
It just seemed to drag on so much

This richly multi-layered and multi-generational family saga from acclaimed Portuguese author Lydia Jorge – an author I was sadly unaware of – tells the story of two families, one white, one black, one middle-class, one working-class, and how their destinies become inextricably intertwined. The wealthy Leandros own a derelict fish canning factory. The Matas, immigrants from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, are their tenants and have set up home in the factory compound. One night, when most of the Leandros are away on their holidays, their matriarch is found dead at the gates of the factory. Only one member of the family is around to deal with this, the granddaughter Milene, who is warmly welcomed by the Matas but whose appearance among them sets off a chain of events which bring unexpected consequences and much turmoil in their wake. In spite of its slow, but expert, pacing, perhaps even because of it, I found the novel a real page-turner, in which the back stories are gradually revealed and the reader begins to understand more and more of the family dynamics and is drawn into their world. All this is set against a vividly evoked background of racial, social, economic and political issues. The characterisation is nuanced and three-dimensional, especially in the case of Milene, who is surely one of literature’s most intriguing figures, and who holds the many threads of the narrative together. The unique narrative voice with its rhythmic cadences I found compelling and was drawn more and more into the storyline. The sense of time and place is particularly convincing. All in all, this is an enormously engaging and enjoyable read.

A unique, gorgeous, and captivating novel. Devoured it in a few sittings.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a digital arc for review.

I am really surprised that I never heard of Lidia Jorge before, as I realise she is a well-respected author of many acclaimed novels. This book was described somewhere as a Portuguese version of some sort of Elena Ferrante's trilogy (which Ialso haven't read...), and this is maybe a good way to think of Jorge in terms of fame and talent.

We follow the life of Milene Leandro, a member of the wealthy Leandro family - the mayor's niece, an heiress to the Leandro canning business - as her grandmother Regina dies suddenly, and her life becomes interwoven with the Matas, Regina's tenants, who find Milene disoriented after the death occurs when her whole family - numerous uncles and aunts - is away. The Matas, who emigrated from Cape Verde, see Milene with a kindness and compassion that her own family lacks; they look after 'the white girl' while her family comes up with a complex rota to make sure someone stays with her at all time. Milene is odd - at thirty, her best friend is Violante, a sixteen year old girl. She calls her cousin who lives in the States daily and leaves long voicemails on his answering machine, even though he never answers and never calls back. It is a long and slow novel but everything comes together, and the perversity, racism and contempt of the Leandros become more and more apparent at every page.

The translation, by Margaret Jill Costa and Annie McDermott, is stunning - beautifully written, smooth, just perfect.

English language readers are indebted to Lidia Jorge (author), Margaret Jill Costa (translator), and Annie McDermktt (translator) for this rich, descriptive work. In it, we have a masterfully paced and nuanced exploration of race, class, and extended family dynamics. Anyone who reads this book and doesn’t feel for Milene is simply a heartless human being, with the human being part in doubt. I am doomed to book hangover for days after this one.
Thank you to the aforementioned author and translators, Liveright publishing, and NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review

tysm to netgalley and wwnorton for this arc. i wanted VERY badly to like this book, but something about the prose was incredibly off putting. i hate to put it on translators, but since i can’t read portuguese i will never be sure if it’s the fault of the writing or the translation. the exposition was bizarre, the continued mention of “we wouldn’t know that for two years” gave the book tension it didn’t deserve. the character choices were bizarre given we don’t get backstory until nearly 3/4 of the way through. and i wanted so badly to be placed even more in the setting because i find southern portugal so compelling and the setting is a huge part of the plot and is so critical to the race relations and morés of the book and yet i just felt sort of displaced. ugh hate to dislike a book especially one that i just spent 500 pages reading but it was just too uneven which is just so frustrating in a book that does have a lot i was so excited about.

Novelist Lidia Jorge’s The Wind Whistling in the Cranes tells the interwoven sagas of the Portuguese Leandro family and the immigrant Mata Family from Cape Verde, a Portuguese colony until the mid-1970s. Jorge centers their story around a canning factory founded by Jose Joaquin Leandro in 1908 in Portugal’s southernmost coast.

As the book opens, Milene Leandro has gone to the factory in search of the truth about the recent death of her grandmother, Dona Regina Leandro. Clad only in her nightgown, the feeble elderly woman had mysteriously escaped the back of an ambulance and made her way to the family’s old factory where she died.
With Dona Regina’s children out of the country and unreachable after her body had been found,

granddaughter Milene Leandro, whose father is dead, knows her aunts and uncles will demand answers when they return. Obsessed with learning the truth, she goes in search of the Matas, whose many members have been paying monthly rent to their landlady, Dona Regina, and have converted the decaying factory into a multi-family home for the large Mata clan.

When Milene finds the factory deserted, she sits down to wait. Upon the Mata’s return from several days in Lisbon, they are shocked to discover a young white woman concealed behind their sheets left hanging on the clothesline and further shocked to learn of their landlady’s death on the property during their absence. The Mata’s take in the white stranger for the night.

Thus begins Milene Leandro’s relationship with the Matas, one that will have repercussions throughout the two families.

The Wind Whistling in the Cranes focuses on changes occurring in Portugal from before the 1974 Carnation Revolution and into the 1990s—the present of the story. At the heart of those changes was the end of Portuguese colonialism in such places as Angola and the Cape Verde Islands. The translators’ notes at the front of the novel provide the history readers need to understand this backdrop.

The white Portuguese Leandros and the black Cape Verdean Matas are very different families, but, in a sense, they both have their own traditional outlooks. In the midst of conflict, Milene Leandro and Antonio Mata are the novel’s hope for the future.

The Wind Whistling in the Cranes is a strange novel. Much of the story takes place in Milene’s head as she ponders how to deal with events in her life. The workings of Milene’s mind will exasperate readers at times, but I found her intriguing and likeable. Through Milene’s obsessions, Lidia Jorge introduces many moral and social questions. Without Milene’s mental wanderings, this could be a more straightforward book. With them, it is a treasure.

Many thanks to Liveright and W. W. Norton for an advance reader copy. I am waiting for English translations of Lidia Jorge’s other novels.

An unusual family saga set largely in a Portuguese cannery in the 1990s. Milene, more of less an outcast in her own family- the Leandros- wants to know why and how her grandmother died. The Leandrod sold the cannery to the Mattas, immigrants from Cape Verde, who have turned it into a compound of sorts. This ranges through many issues of class, race, economics and change. It felt overwritten at times but somehow I kept reading. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of world literary fiction in translation.

I wanted so badly to enjoy this one, but unfortunately I found the plot to be too meandering for my taste.

The Wind Whistling in the Cranes is a lovely multilayered novel, ably translated from its original Portuguese. Set in the 1990s, it is the story of two families that become entwined for a very unusual reason - the death of the matriarch of one of the families and the family that rents housing in a building owned by the other family - and whose entanglement only grows as the novel progresses. Be warned that this book is long and I did not read it quickly, so readers will be investing considerable time in it. But, the investment pays off with a book well worth reading.

What a romp! Was a solid and nuanced escape from the winter blues! Recommend to read when it’s cold and you’re missing travelling to beautiful and haunting places.

Read in one sitting. Absolutely captivating. When Leandro matriarch Regina is found dead outside the building, her peculiar granddaughter Milene investigates, ultimately—catastrophically—enmeshing herself with the Matas. Perpetuating a tradition established by Gabriel García Márquez, this enduring novel of innocence and prejudice announces Jorge as an international powerhouse.

Founded in 1908 by Jose Joaquim Leandro, the Fabrica de Conservas Leandro was a canning factory near Lisbon, located in the seaside town of Algarve. Considered to be a great benefactor, Leandro hired children, nonworkers, to generate extra income for their families. The tides changed during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, marking an end to Portuguese Colonial War. Workers seized control of factories and farms, selling off machinery, leaving businesses in ruin. As of 1984, the Factory was home to a family of Cape Verdean immigrants, the Matas family, who paid a nominal rent to Regina Leandro in exchange for maintaining the abandoned canning compound.

"[Milene] had walked back and forth along that path, looking for some trace of her grandmother, a footprint, a hair...anything to explain or at least confirm what had happened...Milene could visualize [with clarity] Grandmother Regina, in her nightdress, giving the ambulance men the slip making her way back to the Fabrica de Conservas Leandro, 1908." How had Grandmother managed to walk, in the dark, through mud and slurry, only to die at the gates of the Factory? "[Milene] felt she wouldn't be able to keep intact for much longer the basket of facts inside her head. These facts would all begin to disintegrate, to escape like freed ions...then, when her aunts and uncles arrived [from holiday], she would have nothing to tell them". Milene pried open the gates of the seemingly deserted Factory. She found a place to hide behind a "fabric forest" of hanging sheets.

"Glory...once achieved by a single member of a family, glory can nourish past and future generations, bestowing on them meaning they would otherwise lack...Janina's triumph on stage, the Matas' triumph with that building, their house...the joy of sitting in the third row at the Coliseu dos Recreios...Driven on by wild applause that reverberated...had now run up against tragedy...Behind the washing partly hidden by the sheets...[a] person, huddled...looking at once defenseless and menacing...". Grandmother had been their landlady, therefore, Milene was their landlady as well. Matriarch Felicia Mata felt it was a blessing to break bread with Milene and let her spend the night. "You are not alone. you're with the Matas".

Each of Milene's aunts thought "her whole life had been turned upside down by this earthquake". Inconvenienced. Holidays abruptly ended. Newspapers reported "truths and lies...skillfully woven into what appeared to be the truth. The Leandros were "immersed in thoughts that had nothing to do with the truth". So tedious...inexplicable. Milene's thoughts were inconsequential.

"The Wind Whistling in the Cranes" by Lidia Jorge is a sweeping saga of the Leandro and Matas families against a backdrop of political and financial changes set to alter the landscape and change the lives of the citizenry of Algarve. Author Jorge has thoroughly, painstakingly, detailed the protagonists of the Mata family This reader came to love and understand Felicia Mata and her son, Antonino. The Leandos, a rich family, boasting a mayor among them, are fully fleshed out as well. Milene Leandro was my favorite.

I highly recommend this beautifully written work of historical fiction.

Thank you W.W. Norton & Company, Liveright and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.