Even in the hands of a titan like Allende, this approach isn’t always successful. Allende’s style is impressively Olympian and the payoff is remarkable: a huge overview of generations, decades and countries. Characters are a lot like gym weights it’s much easier to hug them close than it is to hold them further away. This kind of narration is extraordinarily difficult.
An omniscient narrator sees into the minds not only of Victor and Roser, but of many people who brush past along the way, sometimes revisiting them, sometimes leaving them behind in the political riptides. Most of the story is told in episodic narration, or even summary. Given that Allende has set herself the task of covering half a century in a relatively short book, it isn’t surprising that dialogue is minimal. In this way, Allende shows us that even the briefest moments of intimacy can venerate the soul’s beauty. They suspend the suffering and crystallize their humanity. Forever exiles to Chileans, Venezuelans, and Spaniards, Victor and Roser recover their agency by lovingly renewing their partnership. She alerts us to suffering only to investigate the alienation - or personal exile - that drips from the tap of a savage world. The question that interests Allende is to what extent love awakens the feelings that make us human even as war and exile work to destroy them. There is no ornament to her description of Spain and Chile, but rather than feeling brutalist or cold it comes across as melancholic.
her work moves with the economy of a fairy tale, as she collapses the long lives of her characters into a quick 13 chapters. In that vein, Allende allows her writing to breathe. Read Full Review >Īllende sees that to embellish the violence of war is to create distance from it, which can be useful in the immediate aftermath of irreparable trauma but would feel oddly escapist after nearly eight decades of reflection. A Long Petal of the Sea is a draft of the book it could have been if the corporations profiting from its publication had invested in a rigorous editorial process to support Allende’s noblesse oblige. Though she shared their thoughts constantly, their interiority felt forced, falsified into caricature sketches meant to add emotional heft to scenes quickly overwhelmed by summary. I like that Allende pays attention to the lives of women, but I didn’t, at any point, forget that these characters were fictional. The attributions are laden with unnecessary and burdensome adjectives. Less interested in scene than in sweep, Allende nonetheless describes her characters’ emotions with great detail, writing in third person with an omniscience that drains any wonder from their choices and interactions. no amount of summary - pages and pages of historical and political background in which every conclusion feels foregone - is enough to save the dialogue that follows from exposition.
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