Review: A Long Petal of the Sea

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review of Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea

I am sucker for sweeping saga – and a longtime Allende fan – so this is a lot of what I knew I’d like.

We open with compelling scenes from the Spanish Civil War as our protagonists slowly get ground down by the Franco fascists. There’s a lot happening, and I’m quickly won to sympathy for most of the characters, but the gist of it is (view spoiler)[ that our central characters – those who survive – have to flee to Chile.

What follows is another chapter in their saga, as the characters become increasingly Chilean. At a generational level, we see Chile as the refuge for those fleeing the fascists of Spain, and then, eventually, the reverse journey. It’s striking to see Allende write of her cousin Salvador Allende, whose assassination brought about a dictatorship equivalent to fascism.

So, I love how this works at that level of lifespan – it gives us a sense of a world whose patterns and narratives come into view only over decades rather than in the course of a shorter time.

I love as well the central “romance” here. Victor and Roser do not originally love each other in a romantic sense. When Roser’s husband and the father of her child – Victor’s brother – dies, though, the two marry out of convenience. They’re carried along by the tides of a larger history, and they eventually do fall in long in a more conventional way – though it comes about as a striking and memorable response to the history they, and they alone, share.

It may be a bit much that Allende gives Victor a truly happy ending. He is at last reunited with the ‘love child’ of his great late adolescent passion, and he gets to enjoy both the family he has loved and the family he has begotten. It may not ring completely authentic, but it’s hard not to root for something good to happen to a man whom we have watched grow from fearful adolescent – someone who holds the heart of a would-be Republican hero-soldier – into a careful old surgeon. (hide spoiler)]

The early Allende – House of the Spirits and the Eva Luna books – is great, world-class literature. This lacks some of that inspired subtlety and, like much of Allende’s later work, feels more like thoughtful, comforting work than the ground-breaking stuff of her early career.

Still, there’s a lot of passion here, and I do recommend it as a reminder of the excellence of that early work and, for its own sake, as a saga that has a lot that satisfies.




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