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Archive for January, 2007

“Daughter of Fortune,” Isabelle Allende

January 6, 2007 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Books, General, Historical

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It has appealing characters, a feminist storyline and an interesting historical period, but does not quite pull them together without interference from an agenda. Books have accessible personalities and deeper subconscious ones. The deep waters of Daughter of Fortune seem to carry a polemic, a dangerous undercurrent for a novel.

The first part of this story focuses on the childhood of a Chilean waif taken in by a childless woman and raised as her daughter. Small mysteries appear and are solved, and interesting characters keep things going, but where it all leads to is a tiresomely long paean to passionate adolescent love, obviously doomed by the incompatability of its victims, the waif Eliza and a smouldering young man. Allende is setting this up as a straw man, but her obvious pleasure in portraying passion undercuts her intentions.

The straw man begins his fall with Eliza’s decision to run away and follow her wandering lover to the California Gold Rush. The pace and interest of the novel picks up as a Chinese doctor shangaied onto a Chilean merchant ship helps Eliza survive the boat crossing and becomes her friend in California. Allende writes well about the Gold Rush and the wildness of this time, and creates a believable friendship between Eliza and the doctor, but the pace of her novel is increasingly clumsy as she tells stories from other protaganists and segues into pamphlateering about injustice and racism. The true story is Eliza’s growth away from adolescent fantasy toward self-reliance and her recognition of real love for her Chinese friend. This kept me going and was rewarding, but I felt a vague mistrust by the time it was told. Allende can’t resist a political lecture, and I began to think that the whole novel was in danger of becoming one.

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