A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Published January 2020 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:

In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. 

Together with two thousand other refugees, Roser and Victor embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, the couple embraces exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war. Starting over on a new continent, they face trial after trial, but they will also find joy as they patiently await the day when they might go home. Through it all, their hope of returning to Spain keeps them going. Destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.

My Thoughts:

Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors - she is superb at writing sweeping sagas that span generations of captivating, unusual characters set in interesting times and places, most often set, at least in part, in Allende's homeland, Chile. Six decades, three generations, much of the book set in Chile - in that regard, A Long Petal of the Sea is no exception. 

This is by far the most political of the books by Allende that I've read and, while I'm not opposed to that in a book, it did overwhelm the story for me. That being said, I learned so much about the Spanish Civil War and the politics of Chile and it was fascinating to compare both of those political environments with the current state of affairs in this country. Allende condemns both sides for atrocities they commit but as the child of a man who headed a socialist government, it's not surprising that the working class is portrayed more sympathetically. A warning for some - the Catholic church does not fare well in Allende's hands in this book.

You are accustomed to me saying that books would have benefited from a pruning; here, with a story this big, I felt like more would have been better. There would have been more room to include the political stories that Allende wanted to include (some for quite personal reasons - her father was the president of Chile for three years in the 1970's) while also allowing room to flesh out the stories of the families. There were characters I definitely wanted to know more about, characters I wanted to understand better. 

Mind you, this book was named as one of the best books of 2020 by a number of publications so what do I know? Perhaps they all appreciated a decades-long saga that didn't go on for 800 pages. And Allende absolutely manages, in these 314 pages, to explore so many themes, tell us so many stories, and, hopefully, have us wanting to learn more. 

Source: checked out of my local library for August's book club selection