Title - Violeta
Author - Isabel Allende
Translator - Frances Riddle
Publisher - Bloomsbury
Pages – 317
World renowned Chilean writer Isabel Allende launched her new novel titled ‘Violeta’ last week. It was inspired by her mother, Panchita, who died shortly before the Coronavirus pandemic, at the age of 98. According to Allende, her mother and she had a very close relationship, and they corresponded for decades daily – she considers the death of her mother one her greatest losses. Recently, she collected the letters they corresponded and they were altogether 24,000 letters.
As she stated in an interview with ‘The Guardian’ on January 15, 2022, “Everything is there (in those letters), my mother’s whole life, and also my life.” So after mother’s demise, when she got some strength to express herself, she started to write the novel on the basis of mother’s life. The only difference between the mother and Violeta, the protagonist of the novel, is that Violeta is someone who makes a living with her own business while her mother depended on her husband.
Journey
“Violeta, like my mother, was a person, a beautiful woman, that wasn’t very aware of her beauty. She was smart, visionary, talented, with good ideas to make money,” Allende, 79, said in an interview in Spanish from her home in California. “She takes all the chances, whether it’s her love life and the life she wants to lead ... The difference is that my mom always depended financially on someone.”
As Allende’s mother lived for 98 whole years, the protagonist Violeta also lives for 100 years. The novel begins in 1920 with the Spanish Flu pandemic and ends in 2020 with the Corona pandemic and Violeta on the point of death. Altogether the book covers the last 100 years of history through the eyes of a grandmother inspired by her mom, Panchita. It was written in the first person point of view and in the form of a letter by a 100-year-old narrator to her grandson Camilo, whom she has raised since the day he was born.
The book starts like this: “I came into the world one stormy Friday in 1920, the year of the scourge. The evening of my birth the electricity went out, something that often happened during storms, so they lit candles and kerosene lamps, which were always kept on hand for these types of emergencies.
“María Gracia, my mother, began to feel the contractions — a sensation she knew well since she’d already birthed five sons — and she surrendered to the pain, resigned to bringing another male into the world with the help of her sisters, who had assisted her through the difficult process several times. The family doctor had been working tirelessly for weeks in one of the field hospitals and she felt it imprudent to call him for something as prosaic as childbirth.”
Violeta is born into a rich family, members of Chile’s governing class, but after destroying the security from the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Depression, followed by her father’s death, she had to move to the remote and backward south of the country where she grows up in a self-contained colony and assists the family’s benefactors.
Then, her marriage occurs with a well-meaning German agronomist, but it fails due to him being impotent and boring. She leaves him for a dashing and impressive pilot, Julian, who proves to be a scoundrel. But she couldn’t get the divorce from the agronomist as divorce was illegal then in Chile. So she is spared marriage with Julian. But that relationship also turns out to be unsuccessful, though she didn’t leave him despite his brutality and criminality. They have two children, and their story is also an integral part of the novel.
Horrors of the dictatorship
The novel details the horrors of the 1970s dictatorships in South America as well. There, readers could see tens of thousands of suspected political opponents kidnapped, tortured and killed, often through Operation Condor, a US-backed alliance among the region’s right-wing military governments.
“The government was committing atrocities, but you could walk down the street and sleep soundly at night without worrying about common criminals,” Violeta writes of those repressive times.
Violeta’s son is a journalist who seeks exile, first in Argentina, then in Norway after learning he is on the dictatorship’s black list. Julian, Violeta’s partner and the father of her son, here, is depicted as a black character because he involved in the repression by the authoritarian government. However, much of the book involves Violeta’s long, passionate, but troubled relationship with Julian following a short, unsatisfying marriage. Yet, ultimately, Violeta obtains contentment late in life with a retired diplomat and naturalist.
Themes
The novel deals with a wide range of themes, from feminism and verbal abuse, human rights violations and homosexuality, to amorous passions, infidelity and even global warming. Though, mainly set in the Chilean Patagonia, there are moments in Argentina, Miami and Norway. And the novel’s heart is predictably the 1973 coup, part organized by the CIA, which destroyed the leftist Government of Salvatore Allende (the novelist’s uncle) and resulted in the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet. Allende has written about this before – no novel set in Chile in these years can avoid it – but from a different angle or in a different voice.
The book is also full of anecdotes which are, obviously, taken from the author’s own experiences. For instance, throughout her life, Violeta is marked by death like the author herself: that of her mother; her daughter Nieves, the mother of Camilo (a young drug addict inspired by Jennifer, one of the daughters of Allende’s ex-husband Willy Gordon); her governess Miss Taylor and a lover, Roy.
Weaknesses
The main weakness of the book as a novel is missing the dramatic. Writing for ‘The Scotsman’ in the UK, Allan Massie say, “Everything is told in retrospect. Even the most important scenes are related from memory, often distant memory, with little if any sense of the immediate. It also seems that, in order to travel from one pandemic to another, over a span of a hundred years, credibility is sacrificed. One can’t quite believe in a narrator a hundred years old. What one misses is the immediate and dramatic big scene.”
He further says, “The common command of creative writing schools – ‘show, don’t tell’ – is often tiresome, the word ‘narrative’ having its root in telling. Even so, we could do with more showing, less telling here. Perhaps this is why Violeta herself is never quite a convincing or indeed interesting character, her relationship with Julian, especially, is never brought convincingly to life.”
But Massie also praises some aspects in the novel:
“Violeta is full of life, a great sweeping story like a river in spate. It makes for enjoyable and undemanding reading. This is its strength. I can’t imagine readers turning it aside because they are bored. For English-language readers it is agreeably exotic. There is a prosaic realism in the chronicle, happily without any tiresome Latin American ‘magic’.”
In this way, the novel ‘Violeta’ by Isabel Allende is a very interesting book on the 100 years’ history of Chile. The most important thing about her writing is that she still writes with the same enthusiasm that she had some four decades ago when she began writing. According to her, this is her second book she published during the Coronavirus pandemic – the first is a feminist nonfiction book ‘The Soul of a Woman’, and the third one was also finished which is currently being translated and scheduled to publish 2023.