["Who Has Seen the Wind"] is a piece of brilliantly sustained prose, a very beautiful, keen, perceptive rendering of human beings engaged in the ordinary yet profoundly—almost mysteriously—meaningful drama of every day.

A quiet, loose, free sort of book, this one is devoted primarily to the experience of its central character, the boy Brian O'Connal. From his fourth to his twelfth year Brian searches—quite unselfconsciously, quite naturally—for God, for purpose, for meaning in the absolute….

But there is no fulfillment for him, no end to his search at the book's end. Indeed there, in a full and self-conscious way, his quest is only beginning. Through the passage of these early years the small child's often shocking directness has gradually turned into the boy's more penetrant awareness;… without the malice of Ahab hunting the whale, but with a fairly comparable urgency….

But because it is...