A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman’s introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe―betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem at first to tolerate the newcomer’s presence and sympathy, a tide of violence is rising, one he perceives only dimly until it is too late to escape.
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A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman’s introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe―betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem at first to tolerate the newcomer’s presence and sympathy, a tide of violence is rising, one he perceives only dimly until it is too late to escape. Made doubly powerful by her poetic fascination with the violence and volatility of the American landscape itself, Montalbetti’s novel is a thrilling study of the senseless cruelty disappointed men are capable of.
Christine Montalbetti is an award-winning French novelist, essayist, critic and professor of literature at the University of Paris VIII. Nothing but Waves and Wind was inspired by a trip she took to the west coast of Oregon, where the ocean and the proximity of Mount St. Helens fueled her imagination, and gave rise to a series of down-and-out characters whose violence and unpredictability seems determined by their surroundings.