|
Portrait in Sepia. Isabel Allende. Flamingo. UK £16.99 Irish Independent
Readers of Isabel Allende's best-selling Daughter of Fortune and House of the Spirits will be immediately attracted to her latest novel, if only for the fact that it returns to characters and relationships first encountered in those books. Equally ambitious in its scope, Portrait in Sepia follows the intrigues and affairs of four generations of two interconnected families against the backdrop of Chile's War of the Pacific towards the end of the 19th, at the same time as it explores the strange, symbiotic relationship between the two Americas, north and south. Opening with the arrival in Santiago of a bed from England, the book is told in the voice of Aurora, granddaughter of both Paulina del Valle, an empire-building Chilean businesswoman and matriarch, and Eliza Sommers, last encountered as the heroine of Daughter of Fortune. If anything, the arrival of the bed is like the unveiling of a metaphor for love-making, death and birth, all of which are crucial points in any family saga, but all the more so here where the birth of the illegitimate Aurora, and the refusal of Sommers to allow Paulina to adopt her, is the point where the casual, almost lazy narrative gives way to a plot constructed with breath-taking timing and skill. Full of warmth, incident and wonderful observation, Portrait in Sepia is anything but a still and grainy image from an historical past. As the closing of what is in effect a trilogy, it confirms Allende as one of the finest and most entertaining novelists now writing.
|
WB Yeats Siegfrid Sassoon William Shakespeare Ted Hughes Seamus Heaney Eavan Boland Paula Meehan Stephen King WH Auden Harry Potter JR Rowling Maeve Binchy