30 Second Review - Isabel Allende "Ines of my Soul"

My love affair with Isabel Allende continues with me reading her "Ines of my Soul," a novel that is the fictitious telling of the true story of the colonization of Chile, written from the point of view of Ines Suarez, the woman at the center of the founding of the city of Santiago and thanks to whom the city survived. It is an amazing story, made more unreal by the fact that it's linked by true events. The book is a novel because no true account survives of the journey the colonists took, nor of their difficult first years. Instead Allende uses the magic of her pen and a lot of research to craft this book.

Still, it did not truly dawn on me that this actually happened until the disclaimer at the end, because the story is so colorful, the people so large and unreal, their lives possessed by the allure of exploration, by the taming of a wild and dangerous land at the very end of the world. It is an amazing story. And again, the craft and quality that I've come to expect from Allende is there, in full force. Soft and gentle, the words demand your reading. This being one of her most recent novels, her writing has definitely improved and metastasized.

At the center is Ines herself, hailing from simple roots, who, by chance, destiny and her gift of finding water, becomes the mother of Santiago and all of Chile. Intelligent and cunning, she is surrounded by a host of strong women who maintain the city and its men. Also central to the novel is the systematic dismantling and subjugation of the natives of the continent and the wars the colonists wage on the them, especially the Mapuchu. A difficult subject, Allende does not gloss over the savagery that was so common then and while never excessively graphic, it's still sometimes shocking.

Beautiful, fascinating and meticulously written, this is another must-read.

30 Second Review - Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits"

Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits" picked me up from it's first words and would not set me down until decades later, only after its characters lived out their lives, grew rich, then poor, survived wars and atrocities, had children and only after their children and grandchildren did the same. The book was irresistible. Sometimes tedious, but generally engrossing, fascinating and interwoven with the same brand of magic that broke my heart each time I completed a novel by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, this novel shares with "100 Years of Solitude" the same uncanny ability to at once exist in the past and present, but never in the present. Like in "Solitude," Allende mentions, alludes and flat out states events that are not to happen for a hundred pages, but it never seems like a spoiler or as though she is giving anything away. Instead, the richness of the words that lead from point A to point B sustain the novel and its characters and the actual order of events is less important.

Overall, the book is far less dense and is much softer than Marquez' epic first novel and I can not help but say it is more feminine. This novel, Allende's first, is nonetheless written with the same breath as "100 Years of Solitude", and even though it stands alone with a multitude of its own merits and is of wondrous quality, the structure, the magic woven into it, the warm light that suffuses even its darkest pages and the way it cycles onto itself can not help but contribute to this comparison. Not to mention its story - that of several generations of a single family whose country is never named, but is an undeniable allegory for Chile.

A complex and convoluted story, "The House of the Spirits" is a pleasant, refreshing and rewarding read.

30 Second Review - Isabel Allende "Paula"

I have not read much ever since the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez displaced the entire sum of human literature as insignificant and ever since I'd resigned to the memory of his endless sentences, the dreamy metaphors, the impossible settings that moved me to tears. Here and there, I'd pick and choose but never read more than a page of an actual book. And yet.

Isabel Allende was referred to me several times and each time I said I'd get to it. It seems she chose to come to me first as her "Paula" was lent to me with great hesitancy, with only the simple promise of my enjoyment of its pages. Which I did, very much.

The writing of Allende, as I am discovering, is not only fine as lace but has the consistency and magic of a dim room unopened from a previous century. There is also the unmistakable miracle of the taste and feel of Marquez' finest writing in her pages and her being a separate human being from another country, time and place remains a surprising fact. Like I said when I read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" - forever in my mind the greatest single feat of writing ever known to man - these books, his and hers, read like fairy tales. The sentences go on, the years pass and the people that populate the pages seem to live and breathe with an air that is their own.

From the instant I picked up "Paula", it was difficult to set down. Written with endless grace, the book is the ultimate exercise in restraint. Facing the slow death of her child, Allende summons from the deepest depths of her being a text that is a haunting, painful memoir of the years in which her daughter inched closer and closer to death. Woven into the story of mind-numbing days and months spent in the hospital waiting, praying for improvement, is Allende's own story of woe and triumph, of mountains and rivers crossed, filled to the brim with an impossible family made real by the sheer quality and austere seriousness of the writing.

The immense sorrow Allende felt for those months is universal and while we will all face the loss of those we love, the inexhaustible font of words that guide Allende's pen has given voice and words to an ultimate letter of sorrow. Dense, dark and moving, the novel is not an uplifting tale and has no happy ending but instead finds closure in the ending of another of the endless cycles of life and death.

Godspeed, Paula, woman.
Welcome, Paula, spirit.