Kissing the Wind, by W. A.E. Hotchner

A romance fueled by Chet’s Charles Bonnet syndrome and Emma’s Manière’s disease, offers comedy, inspiration, and a scoop of “creative chaos” in a heartwarming story.

Whoever says “seeing is believing,” hasn’t read this novel. The hallucinatory episodes that accompany Charles Bonnet syndrome are magnificently depicted in this story by Hotchner. As a sufferer of the syndrome, he would know. But few people possess the talent and the empathy to weave them into a character’s life as he does.

The underlying plot of Kissing The Wind is ordinary: an illness creates a career crisis, boy meets girl, and love creates the impetus to succeed in the face of seemingly impossible odds. But the strength and beauty of the narrator’s observations are extraordinary. Chet’s hallucinations are laced with the mundane and the stunning: a rubber plant in an elevator, a bathtub full of Geraniums, and Chet’s kidnapping in his Subaru while on his way to his wedding. And his real experiences run the gamut from humorous to lugubrious: a hotel in Kathmandu named the Yak and Yeti, a professional jhankri named Hari Karki who performs a blood ceremony with a live water buffalo, complete with “camera bearing tourists . . . invading the area, snapping their hungry cameras at everything,” and, in Chet’s past, a scene in which a Chris-Craft is split in two by a large ferry, killing his father. In the scene where the water buffalo is butchered, Chet is overcome by guilt and self-anger, which perhaps adds a touch of absurdity as Chet is, after all, a lawyer. And, late in the novel, what a reader expects to be hallucinatory becomes frighteningly real: Emma falling into Charlie’s pool upon a bout of her Manière’s disease and the fierce electrical storm later in Chet’s cottage. These are a part of the penultimate movement in Hotchner’s symphony.

The serious and the facetious in Kissing The Wind are twins, or a kind of emotional schizophrenia. Chet’s cross-examination of Ms. Celluci in the courtroom is not to be missed. He defines “Cacca e Pipi” as “a statement on how not all love is forever. No, not everyone gets to be that lucky.” For him, this is prescience of its opposite, of the rondo that suffuses the final chapters of the novel.

The disheartenment, the romance, and the triumph over adversity in Kissing The Wind are delivered by Hotchner with his patented “creative chaos,” making an enticing story that demands to be read in a single sitting. If there is a tragedy here, it is that Hotchner died at the young age of 102 before he had the chance to convert Kissing The Wind into a screenplay.

NOTE: The manuscript reviewed is an Uncorrected Digital Galley. The novel isn’t scheduled for publication until September 2021. For that reason, this review is only posted on NetGalley and my website until publication, and references in the review to particular circumstances and phrases may be changed before publication. The quoted lines in the review may also change after the book’s publication.

For more about Hotch, visit Newman’s Own Foundation website here.