It took me a long time to read Daughter of Fortune. By some cosmic joke, which the reading gods seem to enjoy, I had paced my book choices in such a way that this book overlapped with Jane Eyre and that is quite a lot of heavy book to process all at once. What it did for me (besides slow me down a bit) was provide an opportunity to compare and contrast two different powerhouse women writers writing about the self-determination of their female leads. […]
1: Eva Luna
This was A’s Book Club January pick, and I was delighted. I had read two other Isabel Allende novels before this (The House of the Spirits, which I will defend to this day over One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Zorro), and I have been hoping to work my way through her canon. And this is an excellent choice. I’ve made it a goal to read through more of Allende’s canon this year, and Eva Luna reminded me why. Eva Luna is a storyteller, though […]
“When she was eight she had fallen in love with Ichimei with all the intensity of childhood passions; with Nathaniel it was the calm love of later years”
I’ve read quite a few Isabel Allende books, but The Japanese Lover is the first I listened to as an audiobook. While it’s certainly not the high-paced story-telling that lends itself well to going for a run/staying awake on my commute, I did find that the way that an audiobook forces you to enjoy every moment of writing really works wonderfully with Allende’s style. “I’m fine here, Lenny. I’m discovering who I am without all my ornaments and accessories. It’s quite a slow process, but a […]
“Words are free, she tried to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers.”
Like Margaret Atwood, I didn’t discover Isabel Allende until a few years ago, but once I did I immediately started searching for her books every time I hit Half Price Books. Eva Luna, one of her earlier novels (1987) wasn’t my favorite of hers, but still a great example of her beautiful way with words. This woman can create a backstory for a character better than just about anyone I can think of — her characters rarely seem to do anything as far as plot goes, but the […]
Allende is a Goddess
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, translated by Magda Bogin
There is so much that Isabel Allende weaves into her writing, it is simply astounding. There is so much history, allegory, and personal stakes woven into the story of one family that it is almost impossible to know where to start. How have I not read this before? Why the holy fucking hell did I have to read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis when this existed in the world. I COULD HAVE DEMONSTRATED THE STUDY OF LITERARY WORKS IN CONTEXT THROUGH THE STUDY OF WORKS IN […]
Not the brightest point in American history
I know Isabel Allende from Daughter of Fortune and Zorro, so when I saw The Japanese Lover (2015) at Costco, I was immediately interested. Alma Belasco is a young, privileged, Jewish girl in Poland. As WWII ramps up to its destructive beginnings, Alma’s family sends her to her rich uncle in San Francisco, where she is safe, but alone, lonely and miserable. Her two companions become her cousin, Nick, and the Japanese-American son of the family’s gardener, Ichimei Fukuda. Alma and Ichi soon become inseparable. After the bombing […]