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Shadows in the Land of Allende
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13419 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
3,452 Words |
| Author
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Dolores Moyano Martin
Dolores Moyano Martin is a Washington-based writer who
specializes in Latin American affairs. |
OF LOVE AND SHADOWS
Isabel Allende
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
274 pp., $17.95
Isabel Allende's first novel, The House of Spirits (New York: Knopf, 1985), was remarkably successful - translated into thirteen languages and a best-seller in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although much influenced by the great Latin American masters of "magical realism," especially Garcia Marquez, the novel is a vivid and compelling family saga set in an unnamed Latin American country (clearly Chile). One looked forward to the author's next novel in which she might be confident enough to move beyond the influence of other writers and create a truly original work about her country. Unfortunately, Of Love and Shadows is not that book.
The title is an indication of the author's intent: the conflict between good (i.e., love) and evil (i.e., shadows). She has stressed her intent in various interviews about this novel: "I feel that life is made of light and shadows," and "between love and violence there is a light/shadow contrast," and finally: "The commitment of Latin American writers today is to tell the story of Latin America and its problems, to present these problems in black and white...so that all the world can see them." But it is precisely this didactic, prescriptive black-white dichotomy imposed by the author and her omniscient narrator over plot and characters that makes Of Love and Shadows as sentimental and predictable as the most romantic of Gothic novels. The debased progeny of this nineteenth-century genre is read avidly today by millions of women, a phenomenon known in the book trade
... (1999 of 20749 Characters)
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