Allende's 'Violeta' recalls century of life

Isabel Allende packs 100 years’ worth of life, memory, love, passion, wisdom, and foolishness in her latest novel, “Violeta.”

Violeta Del Valle is born in 1920, the same year that the Spanish flu arrives in Chile, her home. In the 100 years of her life, she recalls the changes, disasters, and upheavals of the 20^th century as well as the births, deaths, marriages, and love affairs that punctuate her own story.

After Violeta’s overbearing and unethical father loses his fortune and takes his life, Violeta’s family “exiles” themselves to the far south of the country where they live without electricity or indoor plumbing on the farm of a family friend.

Violeta marries young and foolishly, and not long after falls in love and runs away with Julián Bravo, a gorgeous pilot. Despite his infidelities and criminal activities, Violeta stays with Julián for many years, having two children with him.

After a military coup that plunges her country into a brutal dictatorship and her activist son’s name appears on a wanted list, Violeta helps him escape the capital before he is “disappeared.”

Violeta, who always had a head for business and finds myriad ways to earn a very comfortable living, raises her grandson in the capital and is determined to do a better job with him than she did with her own children. However, she eventually finds that possessions are meaningless and that money is only worth the good you can do with it. At age 63, she describes herself as “reborn.”

Violeta’s change in direction is not the result of one huge event, but rather “the turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur” (p 254). Her story is told by her 100-year-old self, full of the wisdom derived from decades of “stumbling down narrow, winding paths” (p 286) that take us from one day, one week, one year to the next.

Allende of course draws upon her own life to fill her novel with the people and events that fascinate the reader. Like Allende, Violeta survives earthquakes, patriarchy, and a cruel dictator. “Violeta” touches on themes present in many of Allende’s works. A friend and mentor tells Violeta, “Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl…You have to take care of yourself in this world” (p 99). And Violeta observes the difference in how the world treats men and women, writing “Julián…went wherever he pleased; he was free of blame, while I was the adulteress, the concubine, the wayward woman who dared to parade around pregnant by her lover” (p 137).

Allende has created another sweeping saga in “Violeta” that whisks the reader through the last century, offering readers fascinating and endearing characters. The world events in Violeta’s life may be familiar, but Allende presents them in a way that demonstrates the cyclical nature of history and offers a subtle warning about the present.

Erdrich's 'The Sentence' is moving, enjoyable

When I began reading Louise Erdrich’s newest novel, “The Sentence,” I immediately fell in love with the story and the characters.

Tookie, and Indigenous woman living in Minneapolis, is sentenced to 60 years after being tricked by two women into committing a serious crime. She is released after 10 years, and begins working at a bookstore where her former middle school teacher works, the same teacher who sent her a dictionary while she was in prison.

In November of 2019, Tookie’s most annoying customer dies and begins haunting the bookstore whenever Tookie is there alone. Tookie survives the trauma of her incarceration and her childhood with a drug-addicted mother, but the haunting, and then the start of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd push her to her limits.

I loved all the characters, especially Tookie’s husband, Pollux, whom she calls her Potawatomi conscience. Pollux is a former boxer and tribal cop (who in fact arrested Tookie) and now works to preserve his culture, especially the spiritual aspects. He is quiet and gentle and completely in love with Tookie.

I also loved that nearly every character is a book lover whose life revolves around books. One proposes getting a Mount Rushmore-style tattoo on her chest of her favorite authors. And, since most of the characters work at a bookstore, they offer to their customers and to us, the readers, recommendations on current and classic fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In fact, at the end of the novel, Erdrich includes “A Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books.” I pored over the list, looking for titles I’d read and titles that I want to read. I even made a copy of the list to keep.

The story is narrated by Tookie, except for two brief passages that Pollux narrates, both of them in the last third of the book. I was pleased to hear Pollux’s voice, and expected to learn more about Tookie, that perhaps she was not an entirely reliable narrator. However, I was disappointed. Pollux’s passages are too brief and offer no insight about Tookie. I fail to see how these passages fit the structure of the novel or add anything essential to the story.

Another flaw has to do with the climax of the story and how Tookie finally comes to terms with her trauma and herself. I won’t spoil it for you, but I’ll just say, I felt there was not enough foundation earlier in the novel about what would happen at the end.

Of course, I could be wrong, and it could simply be that Erdrich is avoiding a trope that she has become tired of in literature. Tookie says about reading in prison, “I found that I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books—the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out of the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character” (p 164).

Despite these minor flaws, “The Sentence” is an excellent, moving book. We see the real trauma that Minneapolis residents experience after Floyd’s murder, the protests, the police violence, and the riots. However, we see it through the lens of Indigenous Americans, whose own oppression is mirrored by that of Floyd’s. Tookie says “…it seemed that around the central fact of any tragedy there swirled a flotsam of extrania like the twenty-dollar bill that led to the police call at Cup Foods, the broken taillight that led the police to stop Philando Castile, the hunger for eggs and a farm woman’s fury to defend those eggs, an incident that started the Dakota War, the let them eat grass phrase that has kept it in memory ever since…’ (p 273). Moreover, the prose is beautiful.”

“The Sentence” is a thoroughly enjoyable read. And I continue to port over Tookie’s Biased List as I mark off titles that I’ve read.

Blood and suspense fill pages of new works

The thing about being a hero is that first you must lose nearly everything, and then you must sacrifice whatever you have left. Park ranger Richard Sundstrum is that hero in Scott Johnson’s “Ungeheuer,” due out in April.

During a prolonged Central Texas drought, four young spelunkers find an underwater cave entrance in the river and inadvertently let loose….something. At the same time, Richard and his young son are camping near the river just two weeks after the death of Richard’s wife.

The pair’s trip is cut short when Richard is called in to help investigate an “animal attack” that killed all of the staff and diners at the Grist Mill restaurant. What follows is a grueling marathon of violence, gore, and death for the characters as well as the reader.

What sets this novel apart from other blood-fests is the structural complexity. Although the third-person narration gives us a relatively objective bird’s-eye view of the slaughter, Johnson alternates perspectives among the primary characters.  He often uses a sound effect to signal the reader that the action rewinds a few minutes and begins another character’s point of view.

The gruesome, heart-racing action will appeal to fans of the horror genre. However, the Central Texas setting and scenery, the suspense, and a few surprises will appeal to all readers.

Those who prefer ghosts to monsters will enjoy “The Hacienda” by Isabel Cañas, which releases May 3. Although it has been compared to Du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” it is closer to 2020’s “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Beatriz marries young, handsome widower Rodolfo to escape poverty and her cruel tia’s kitchen. She moves into his hacienda on a remote maguey plantation and soon discovers that no one else is willing to live in the house, and in fact, that the house doesn’t want Beatriz there either.

Young Padre Andrés tries to help Beatriz “heal” the house of the strange voices and apparitions but must hide his native powers from the Inquisition and his fellow priests. He must also hide his feelings for Beatriz.

This title was a fun, chilling read that transports the reader to 1820’s Mexico, just after the Revolution and the social turmoil that followed. Beatriz and Andrés each narrate alternating chapters, including Andrés’s flashbacks to his youth, and why he was banished from the hacienda by Rodolfo’s first wife.

Colson Whitehead’s latest, “Harlem Shuffle,” is no hero’s journey and offers nothing supernatural but it has plenty of suspense and not a little bloodshed.

Furniture dealer Ray Carney isn’t crooked; he’s just a little bent in a city where anyone who’s not probably isn’t breathing. Carney is happy with his sideline in radios and TVs that have fallen off trucks, and sometimes the odd piece of jewelry, when his cousin Freddie gets him involved in a hotel heist.

The heist puts Carney on the radar of the local mob as well as the local “bent” detective. Not long after Carney settles back into his old routine, he gets swindled by a Harlem banker, which of course requires Carney to exact revenge, just as his crook father would have done.

Whitehead approaches Carney with more than a little humor. When a “colleague” dispatches another crook who has come gunning for them, Carney rolls the body in a “Moroccan Luxury rug” and delivers it to the local body dumping ground. Near the end of the novel, when he and the colleague go to ransom cousin Freddie, the mob lawyer supervising the “deal” is seated in an office furnished with “Templeton Office’s new fall line.”

Whitehead’s graceful prose captures Harlem of 1950s and 60s: “This first hot spell of the year was a rehearsal for the summer to come. Everyone a bit rusty but it was coming back, their parts in the symphony and assigned solos. On the corner, two white cops recapped the fire hydrant, cursing. Kids had been running in and out of the spray for days” (p 21). 

The novel traces the mid-twentieth century changes to New York and its skyline as well as Carney’s maturity from small-time fence, to grudge-bearing criminal, to slightly-bent businessman. It is a fun and rewarding read.