The Wind Knows My Name - Isabel Allende

What's cooler than being cool? Ice cold!

And what's cheaper than trying to write something supposedly moving by brining in children? Adding the Holocaust!

I have long stopped enjoying Isabel Allende novels (actually, I think I only ever really enjoyed Paula), yet I keep on reading them because the Southwark library is so desperately under-stocked. 

And I also read them because they are easy. Yet, this novel is not just the standard "easy" and "sentimental" Allende novel, it's also - as mentioned above - really rather cheap. I hope it's not actually the case, but to me it read as if she was exploiting the suffering of fictional (yet fully believable) children across centuries to sell a few copies and make a few readers feel like they've read something deep about the tragedies of contemporary society. 

Portrait in Sepia - Isabel Allende

 

Damn, how Allende bores me. Then again, she's sold millions of copies worldwide, has plenty of admirers and, when the ebook offer is limited (and at Southwark we're really down to a handful of potentially readable titles for me), beggars can't be choosers. 

I guess the overarching positive is that, by setting this story in the 19th century, she couldn't remind the readers of the importance of Salvador Allende, the dark years of the Pinochet dictatorship etc. 

What she could do though, was cover her novel with the standard romantic patina, the usual empowered rich heroines who defy odds (real or imaginary) to carve their own path, and the habitual love triangles and tangles. 

It's probably quite telling that the part of this story that I enjoyed the most was actually the one set in San Francisco and the interplay between immigrants of various races there - her always identical takes on Chile and its idiosyncrasies just leave me profoundly unmoved.  

A Long Petal of the Sea - Isabel Allende

 

Granted, I only read this book because of the dearth of other available titles from Southwark's ebook library at the time, but damn this was bad...

Pretty much every book I've ever read by Allende brings in her uncle Salvador, which I actually find quite frustrating after a while. One thing is to do it in an autobiographical tale like Paula, but doing it here feels just like a cheap trick to get people to say "oh, yes, I know that guy" (a feeling that then most people vaguely familiar with 1973 Chile will experience again at the multiple mentions of Neruda and Victor Jara). 

Mini-rant aside, for me this book read just like a melodrama aimed at a 19th century audience - everything was theatrical and pseudo-poetic. Of all the things that this novel attempts to cover, the only passages that I found (vaguely) interesting were the ones covering the escape from Barcelona at the end of the Spanish Civil War. On the plus side, at least it was a quick read...

The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende

Am I being overly harsh or is this book simply not of the same standard as Paula? The answer is that maybe I’ve just completely outgrown magical realism (which is sad, because back in the day I had loved A Hundred Years of Solitude so very much).

I honestly think that, had it not been for Clara’s extra sensory abilities, I would have enjoyed the novel a lot more. And I would have probably also liked it better if the characters weren’t ultimately representations of various social and political groups (and periods) in Chilean history (the roman à clef as a genre often gets a bit on my nerves). And the fact that Allende also openly declares that Blanca never married Pedro Tercero because she didn’t love him enough just stings – the guy deserved better.

But then again, most of this probably applies only to 85% of the book, because from the moment Alba gets arrested the novel gains massively in literary, political and moral weight (although it’s really too bad that Allende picked the allegoric name of Alba/Dawn for the character that is meant to symbolize hope for the future – think outside the box!)

Forest of the Pygmies – Isabel Allende

Having read and loved Paula I thought I would give an absolutely different kind of Allende novel a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

It probably has to do with how old and boring I already am, but novels for young adults “these days” usually can’t match the quality and intensity of the old ones (Salgari beats Allende, Molnar beats Grossman, etc.). The three-headed monster is hopefully more a reference to Cerberus than to the Trinity, but its mystery is surely not particularly imaginative (anyone who has ever wondered why Clark Kent is never in the same room as Superman is bound to figure out the riddle quite soon).

Sure, Allende is commendable in her constant desire to point out that all cultures have to be not just respected but also appreciated, but in this book she says that crocodiles are amphibians and I just can’t take that! 

The Postman – Antonio Skármeta

A novel that I bought with my dad as a Christmas gift for my mom (the only book I ever recall buying in a supermarket and not in a bookshop). I still remember my dad explaining to me that Massimo Troisi, the actor who played the titular postman in the movie taken from the novel, was a wonderful artist who died right after finishing the film.

When I read it as a teenager the book made want to get into poetry. I obviously tried with Neruda first, then followed it with the Poètes maudits, Pessoa, Lorca, Kavafis and many others, but to no avail. I was probably too shallow for poetry back then. I should try again, but I’m afraid I’m not much deeper than I was back then.

Skármeta’s novel is about Chile, about its most illustrious poet (Neruda, clearly), and about the poetry of the everyday life of the Chileans. There are plenty of novels in which important historical figures mentor some young and uneducated locals, and they often run the risk of becoming trivial. This novel avoids that. Mario, Neruda’s postman, does not evolve into a luminary of the literary world, and probably this is the reason why the novel isn’t banal, just touchingly beautiful. If at first his inability to express his feelings and the need to recur to Neruda’s poems is a bit too Cyranoesque, some of Mario’s simple thoughts are actually reflections of very serious issues, both political and literary (after all, does poetry belong to those who write it or to those who use it?).