Recent Reviews
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on January 31, 2020
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/allende-masterfully-illuminates-refugee-experience/
Isabel Allende’s new novel could not be timelier. With refugees dominating the news, ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ poignantly reminds us of a lesson we can’t seem to learn. People typically leave home, not because they want to, but because they have to.
This book brings to life the plight of one refugee family shattered by Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. The story follows them as they escape Spain in an odyssey first to a refugee camp in France and then to Chile. Allende’s writing is lush and lyrical. As in many of her novels, she gives us an engaging way to understand how historical forces shape the lives of ordinary people. Here the historical event is the July 1936 military uprising led by General Francisco Franco. His reactionary forces overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government, causing a civil war that leads to immense loss of life.
We get to know Allende’s characters in the ensuing maelstrom. Two brothers, Victor and Guillem Dalmau, take up the fight against Franco. Victor is a medic, Guillem, a soldier. Before the war, the young brothers had lived peaceful lives with their parents and a young woman named Roser, whom their parents had adopted and Guillem had grown to love. Guillem dies in battle, never knowing that Roser is pregnant with their child.
No one in the Dalmau family wants to leave their beloved Barcelona. But in January of 1939, when it becomes clear the vindictive pro-Franco forces will prevail, the family flees. They hike over the Pyrenees in freezing temperatures with little food and no possessions, only to arrive at a French internment camp where thousands of refugees are being held.
In August of 1939, the Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neruda charters a freight boat, the Winnipeg, to transport Spanish immigrants from France to Chile, which he calls “a long petal of sea and wine and snow.” Families receive priority, so Victor makes a dramatic choice. He marries Roser and affirms that baby Marcel is his son. Victor, Roser and Marcel board the boat and leave for Chile.
After suffering through persistent hunger, lack of sleep and poor sanitation, they feel relieved to leave France but fearful about Chile. They had heard Chileans “considered them to be a mob of Reds, atheists, and possibly criminals.” By luck, they meet Felipe del Solar, son of a wealthy, conservative and Catholic Chilean family. While Felipe’s father opposes the resettlement of the Spanish refugees, Felipe feels empathetic. He invites Roser and Victor to live with him until they find jobs.
Victor and Roser still hope to return to Spain. But they start their life as spouses while stopping short of a romantic relationship. Victor enrolls at the School of Medicine and Roser teaches music and performs piano. They both adore Marcel. This novel beautifully explores Victor and Roser’s evolving and deepening love. Over time, their complicated feelings about Victor’s brother ease and their love for one another intensifies into a real marriage.
But history repeats. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet leads a right-wing military coup, which results in the murder of Chile’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende (Isabel’s father’s first cousin). Having known Allende socially, Victor is imprisoned and tortured. When Victor finally gets paroled, the family must make another difficult decision: stay in Chile or escape again.
Allende’s powerful novel shows how war and conflict crush families, forcing them to flee their homes to survive. Currently, millions of refugees have fled from Syria, Guatemala and Mexico as a result of conflict and economic desperation. ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ helps us to imagine the human stories behind the headlines. Allende has written an epic saga about one family’s experience of unwanted exile. Her admiration and empathy for the resilience of refugees find expression in this heartbreaking yet inspiring story.
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout is a wise and talented writer. This truth is reinforced in Olive, Again, her seventh novel. In these thirteen interconnected stories, Strout reveals a keen insight into the human condition. These stories are a meditation about people who are unclear about who they are and why they made the choices they did.
This book is a sequel to Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Olive Kittredge. In that novel, Olive was stubborn, bossy and not the least bit reflective. Like a kaleidoscope, the book showed readers Olive’s many selves. We saw Olive’s shifting emotions and actions in her role as mother, wife, teacher and neighbor. And though we didn’t always like what we saw, Strout highlighted the many selves that dwell in a person. Twenty years later, Olive is still cantankerous, opinionated, and self-involved, but she has softened. Her narcissism has given way to humility as she begins to question what it might feel like - to be another person. In her eighth decade, Olive’s revelation is poignant because she knows her time on earth is coming to an end.
Olive still resides in the small town of Crosby, Maine. After her husband Henry died, she married Jack Kennison, a former Harvard professor who also harbors regret about several of his decisions. Olive and Jack wrestle with their diminishing physical capabilities and imminent decline. They struggle to make sense of the relationships in their lives. Olive wonders why she was mean to her first husband Henry and why she feels such distance from her son Christopher. Jack wonders why he had an affair when he loved his wife, Betsy. He, too, is estranged from his only child, Cassie, who lives in San Francisco.
When Olive’s son Christopher, his wife Ann and their four children visit Olive, their time together is not easy. There is misunderstandings and miscommunication. Belatedly, Olive has begun to contemplate the small choices and big decisions that shaped her life. She realizes her frayed relationships might derive from her actions and not solely the deficiencies in Christopher and Ann. “She could not understand what it was about her, but it was about her that had caused this to happen. And it had to have been there for years, maybe all of her life, how would she know. As she sat across from Jack -stunned – she felt as though she had lived her life as though blind.”
One night, Jack and Olive are at a restaurant and the woman with whom Jack had an affair walks by their table. They speak and Jack is shaken. “What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. … He senses that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.”
Olive and Jack seem to lack an understanding of their current selves or the factors that shaped their personalities. Olive does know that her father’s suicide affected her, but that tragedy was never processed. Now as they reach the end of their lives, Olive and Jack feel distressed about what their lives meant and how they chose to live. Could they have changed themselves in a significant way? Maybe. Maybe not. But awareness might have led to them to more intentional lives.
Melancholy hovers around the characters. Loneliness haunts every story Some readers might say the novel is dark. It is hard to read about regret and remorse. But I believe Elizabeth Strout’s beautiful book is a gift, a wake-up call to us all. She is warning readers that even though self-awareness is hard, we don’t have to live with so little understanding of ourselves. We can reflect on how our behavior affects not just those who we love, but everyone we encounter.
Suddenly, Love by Aharon Appelfeld
In this beautiful novel by Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, we experience the pain, suffering and hopefully calm that can come with self-discovery. Apppelfeld’s wisdom permeates this story as we witness the psychological shifts that can occur in a person whose early life choice inflicted suffering on those he loved. Appelfeld’s sparse and elegant prose gives us a window into the hearts of two tormented souls.
Ernst is a seventy-year-old Red Army veteran who was born in Ukraine and now lives in Israel. A former investment advisor, he spends his days writing unpublished novels. Ernst searches for words that will explain to himself his youthful choices that caused his parents, wife and daughter pain. While he was betraying his fellow Jews and fighting for the communists in Russia, his family perished in the Holocaust. When he was a young man, “The thought that he was freeing people from the prison of religion-inspired him to act.”
Each day he writes and each day, he throws work in the garbage.
But since Ernst’s operation two years ago, Irena, his 32- year old caretaker, comes to his small apartment every day. Initially, she assists him with his physical needs, but as time passes, she becomes his confidant and confessor. The ghosts of WWII haunt her life too. Her parents were in concentration camps and Irena was born in a German displaced person camp. She and her parents immigrated to Israel, where Irena still lives in her family’s apartment. Since her parents passed away, Irena continues to set the table for three on the Sabbath and other Jewish Holidays. In dreams and memories, she talks with her parents and they communicate with her. Though uneducated, Irena draws on a well of deep spirituality and believes that “life is a continuum that extends into the unknown.”
But Ernst’s family has no presence in his life. He has not been able to dream or even remember them. He has repressed his early years. Due to Irena’s love and loyalty, Ernst’s parents and grandparents return to Ernst’s memory. He stops throwing his writing in the trash. “Irena’s presence, her closeness, opens corridors for him to worlds he never knew.” Soon, he remembers tender times he spent as a young boy in the Caspian mountains with his wise and devout grandparents. He remembers how his grandfather, an observant Jew, taught him to appreciate the rituals and reverence for G-d. All of which he forgot or repressed when he became a Communist.
Though I believe therapy might have been more productive for Ernst than the slow, plodding process of writing, especially at the dawn of his life. However, Appelfeld’s, Suddenly Love, celebrates the power of human connection and the power of writing to heal.
