I have never considered myself a fan of Mitchell, though I’m always a sucker for a good prairie story. His novel, ‘The Kite’, was a delightful little story and ‘Who Has Seen the Wind’ has its own charm. As with any good prairie tale, it’s the small town characters that make it or break it, and Mitchell creates some great ones. Being a pseudo writer myself, I found it impressive that Mitchell could drift from one character to another so smoothly without announcing it to the reader. There was the odd time that I had to stop and check to see who was being described, but those times were few. All in all, I can see why the book was awarded so many accolades.
From Wikipedia:
Who Has Seen the Wind is a novel written by Canadian author W. O. Mitchell, who took the title from a famous poem by Christina Rossetti. It was first published in 1947[1] and has sold close to 1 million copies in Canada.[2] Who Has Seen the Wind is considered to be Mitchell’s best known work[3] and is taught in a number of Canadian schools and universities.[4] Quill & Quire listed Who Has Seen the Wind at number 7 on their list of the top 40 Canadian novels of the 20th century.[5]
Who Has Seen the Wind tells the story of young Brian O’Connal growing up in the 1930s on the Saskatchewan prairies. Broken into four parts covering different times in young Brian’s life, the novel shows Brian struggling to come to terms with issues of life and death on the Canadian prairies. In Mitchell’s own preface he clearly explains the central theme of the book when he states, “I have tried to present sympathetically the struggle of a boy to understand…the ultimate meaning of the cycle of life. To him are revealed in moments of fleeting vision the realities of birth, hunger, satiety, eternity, death. They are moments when an inquiring heart seeks finality, and the chain of darkness is broken.”[
The Prairie Fiddler 