On 'The Harmattan Winds'

“We played the fool talking with long-legged words so as to mock the bastards who feed off human sorrow.” This is the mantra of Hugues and Habéké, the child heroes of Sylvain Trudel’s The Harmattan Winds, translated into English by Donald Winkler. Trudel published the novel, his debut, in the original French when he was 23, but, given his young age, you get the feeling that he sourced a lot of it from his own juvenilia. At its core, the book explores a specific characteristic of precocious children: the dissonance between the things they can read about and what they can truly understand. But that idea itself is too limited to support a novel, and it makes The Harmattan Winds, at 152 pages, feel far longer than it should.