JOIN USA life bookmarked by two pandemics
The cover of the English language edition of Isabel Allende’s latest novel, Violeta, declares it to be the story of “One extraordinary woman…One hundred years of history…One unforgettable story”. The book does tell the story of the life of a woman, Violeta Del Valle, for over 100 years. Whether she is extraordinary (besides living to be a centenarian) or if the story is truly unforgettable is another matter.
Allende herself has led an extraordinary life and her books have established her reputation as one of the Spanish language’s best-loved contemporary writers. With works like The House of the Spirits (now that’s an unforgettable story) and Eva Luna amongst her best-known novels, Allende herself sets the bar high for spinning multi-generational family epics. Thus the high expectations from Violeta which has an enormously promising premise but is ultimately let down by the fact that the main protagonist falls short of being a magnetic character for the reader.
Violeta is an epistolary novel, narrated in the first person by Del Valle to someone named Camillo (whose importance and role in her life will be revealed only toward the final quarter of the book). Violeta was born to a family of fading fortunes in an unnamed South American country (though by geographical location and description clearly meant to be Allende’s native Chile) during the influenza pandemic of 1920.
Her birth happens during a dramatic storm and storms — both meteorological and emotional — wreak havoc throughout her life. Her father commits business fraud and suicide and the family escapes to the countryside to eke out a life there. They are aided by a radical political activist, Teresa, who also happens to be the lover of Josephine Taylor, an Irishwoman hired to be Violeta’s governess.
Teresa and Josephine happen to be the two most fascinating characters in the book — and you can’t help wish that Allende had written about them and their extraordinary lives.
Instead, we have Violeta who is impetuous and lusty and beautiful and has men falling for her and who manages to restore her family’s lost fortune through some wise real estate investments as an adult. The men who fall for her and who she falls for are either boring and trustworthy or exciting and violent. After marrying the first kind — a second-generation German immigrant whose life’s mission is cattle insemination — Violeta meets a dashing, handsome pilot with whom she has a lusty, no-holds-barred affair. The lusty pilot, Julián, also turns out to be a violent criminal. Violeta proceeds to have two children with Julián and the reader shakes their head at the inevitable sequence of bad decisions.
The early rural poverty of her life is a distant enough memory; Violeta is able to dress in Dior and take flights to Miami and live a transcontinental, jet setting lifestyle. Occasionally a septic tank overflows after a hurricane and up burbles rolls of money and some shadowy threats by unseen forces. Credit where it’s due though — even Violeta seems aware that her life is really not that compelling enough to be a novel for at one point she complains to a psychiatrist, “I’ve led a banal life, Dr Levy, I’m mediocre”.
A marketing opportunity?
And here we come to the main issue with the book — why did it need to be about a woman who has lived a hundred years and whose life is bookmarked by two pandemics? To pounce on the marketing opportunity that such a coincidence provides? Sure, that could work. But this framing also means that the book suffers from an almost pedestrian plotting involving a timeline of Major World Events and Violeta’s own life. You can, you feel, almost see the Excel sheet and the two parallel columns as revolutions and cultural events are checked on the author’s list as the plot progresses.
This is not to say that the usual pleasures of Allende’s prose are not to be savoured — there’s her usual keen insight into the life of Latin American women and politics in the 20th century and much wit and affection in the small, jewel-like portraits drawn of Teresa and Josephine. But when we look back at the long and illustrious career that Allende has had, it’s clear that Violeta will not rank among the best of her literary legacy.