Since publishing her first book, The House of the Spirits , in , the Chilean writer Isabel Allende has written ten novels, four memoirs, and three young adult novels. She writes a lot. For such an established and successful author to step outside her bailiwick is a brave move but one that, unfortunately, does not open up exciting new territory. Readers, confronted by fiction set in remote places and eras, are likely to suspend more disbelief than usual; the mingled facts and mysteries of the past make good fertilizer for fantasy.
Add a dash of the supernatural and an avalanche of detail, and suddenly the whole enterprise is so heightened that soap opera plots and overwrought prose seem like purposeful stylistic choices. The book is meant to be a diary that Maya keeps over the course of a year. My memory goes in circles, spirals, or somersaults.
Recaps are offered of events that are only a few pages in the past. Small errors and unlikely instances pervade the book. This is a novel that wishes to instruct.
And, oh, the drugs, the drugs. She employs plenty of adjectives in describing her addiction but conveys little. I was dirty, smelly, and disheveled, increasingly crazed and sick. I happened to be reading Edward St. Aubyn has the dubious advantage of having been a heroin addict, but, for sake of comparison, here is how he gets at the bliss of shooting up:. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.
We have similar tastes in books, movies, and music, and we laugh at the same things. Between the two of us we know more than a hundred crazy jokes. Where has Allende the self-proclaimed feminist gone? At this point, 17 books in, I think the time is past for blaming the translator. She reads her English translations and offers notes on them. It might be time to accept that this style, with all its limitations, is her style.
