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A Long Petal of the Sea
by Isabel Allende
I found this book intensely disappointing. This was my first book by Allende and I’m not entirely sure I’ll give her another chance.
This novel reads like a high school history book, one of the ones with a few “profiles” of real people thrown in to humanize it. It is the story of Victor and Roser, who aside from their (admittedly horrifying) experiences in the Spanish Civil War and concentration camps (yes, plural), seem to drift through their lives with little to no conflict or reaction in the face of infidelities and exiles. Little else happens. They both work; they raise their child. Victor plays chess with Salvador Allende, then-President of Chile and cousin of the author. Both seem as if they are floating through their lives at an impersonal distance. It makes for boring reading.
One of the most irritating things about this book is that entire chapters trace the lives of those who come into contact with the main characters in great detail. It almost feels more like a series of vignettes than a novel. The characters themselves are unlikeable until the last few chapters and are generally flat and unchanging.
I also felt cheated because the book blurb makes it sound like the plot centers around the Spanish Civil War and the voyage on the Winnepeg to Chile. I have little knowledge about either of these events and was excited to learn more. Allende even mentions this again in her acknowledgments at the end of the book. But alas, very little of the story talks about either the Civil War or the transatlantic voyage. Each chapter covers a span of several years and so is almost a recitation if facts more so than a true plot.
I could go on, but I’ve lost enough hours of my life to this book as it is. One star because the writing itself wasn’t bad, at least not on a sentence-by-sentence level.
This novel reads like a high school history book, one of the ones with a few “profiles” of real people thrown in to humanize it. It is the story of Victor and Roser, who aside from their (admittedly horrifying) experiences in the Spanish Civil War and concentration camps (yes, plural), seem to drift through their lives with little to no conflict or reaction in the face of infidelities and exiles. Little else happens. They both work; they raise their child. Victor plays chess with Salvador Allende, then-President of Chile and cousin of the author. Both seem as if they are floating through their lives at an impersonal distance. It makes for boring reading.
One of the most irritating things about this book is that entire chapters trace the lives of those who come into contact with the main characters in great detail. It almost feels more like a series of vignettes than a novel. The characters themselves are unlikeable until the last few chapters and are generally flat and unchanging.
I also felt cheated because the book blurb makes it sound like the plot centers around the Spanish Civil War and the voyage on the Winnepeg to Chile. I have little knowledge about either of these events and was excited to learn more. Allende even mentions this again in her acknowledgments at the end of the book. But alas, very little of the story talks about either the Civil War or the transatlantic voyage. Each chapter covers a span of several years and so is almost a recitation if facts more so than a true plot.
I could go on, but I’ve lost enough hours of my life to this book as it is. One star because the writing itself wasn’t bad, at least not on a sentence-by-sentence level.