Product Description
Portrait in Sepia is both a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile and a marvellous family saga peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits, two of Allende's most celebrated novels. As a young girl, Aurora del Valle, suffered a brutal trauma that has shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed, epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.
Amazon.com Review
Isabel Allende has established herself as one of the most consummate of all modern storytellers, a reputation that is confirmed in her novel
Portrait in Sepia. Allende offers a compelling saga of the turbulent history, lives, and loves of late 19th-century Chile, drawing on characters from her earlier novels,
The House of Spirits and
Daughter of Fortune.
In typical Allende fashion, Portrait in Sepia is crammed with love, desire, tragedy, and dark family secrets, all played out against the dramatic backdrop of revolutionary Chile. Our heroine Aurora del Valle's mother is a Chilean-Chinese beauty, while her father is a dissolute scion of the wealthy and powerful del Valle family. At the heart of Aurora's slow, painful re-creation of her childhood towers one of Allende's greatest fictional creations, the heroine's grandmother, Paulina del Valle. An "astute, bewigged Amazon with a gluttonous appetite," Paulina holds both the del Valle family and Allende's novel together as she presides over Aurora's adolescence in a haze of pastries, taffeta, and overweening love.
One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is Allende's decision to turn her heroine into a photographer: "through photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past." There is little confusion in Allende's elegantly crafted and hugely enjoyable novel. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk
Luscious, delicious, savory - Reviewed on 2007-12-22
"Through photography and the written word," Aurora del Valle says, "I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing."
Here is the story of Aurora del Valle, granddaughter of the powerful Paulina del Valle and of Eliza Sommers [the protagonist in Daughter of Fortune]. Allende weaves another web of tangled relationships, passion and heroism, using the voice of a young girl living first in San Francisco, and then in Chile at the end of the nineteenth century. She depicts love in its many forms from the passion of youth to the comfort and subtlety in old age, from that of the family to cruel exploitation and the consequences of all of them.
Margaret Sayers Penden is a fine translator. Luscious, delicious, savory. I look forward to the next one.
by Judith Helburn
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women
powerfully feminine family saga - Reviewed on 2007-06-21
6 customers found this review helpful, 1 did not.
The story told by Aurora del Valle in Isabel Allende's "Portrait in Sepia" is profoundly engrossing, captivating the reader in a net of unusual events among remarkable, original characters.
"Portrait in Sepia" reconstructs the past of Aurora, the protagonist of "The Daughter of Fortune", a very successful earlier novel by Allende, but it does not mean it is a mere sequel. This novel stands on its own and can be read separately as a whole. It is deeply rooted inn the South American tradition of convoluted, multigenerational family sagas. There are all the characteristic elements: the ancestral characters are eccentric, colorful and each of them has a life worth of a full novel, their labirynthine adventures form a network of separate, but intersecting stories; the circumstances of birth of the main protagonist, the narrator - Aurora, are dramatic and romantic at the same time ; the background historical events in the described period (the break of 19th and 20th centuries) are at least as full of suspense and revealing the human nature, as the personal adventures of the characters.
Aurora del Valle, at thirty, is finally able to reconstruct her past. The families involved on the maternal and paternal side could not be more different. Aurora's paternal grandparents, Paulina del Valle and Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, are a wealthy couple from Chile, living in San Francisco, sophisticated and successful in business. Paulina is a typical matriarch, who rules the family, has a very strong personality, moods which affect everyone around her, and particular tastes and whims, one of which are the Chilean pastries, which lead her often to the small store in San Francisco's Chinatown. The owner of the store is Eliza Sommers, Aurora's maternal grandmother, who run in pursuit of an unfaithful lover from Chile to California, where she found real love in the arms of a Chinese doctor, Tao Chi'en. They are blessed with two children, Lucky and Lynn, but cursed by the absolute beauty and naivety of their daughter. Lynn gives them Aurora, and they take care of the child until Tao's death when Aurora is five; from then on she lives with Paulina and goes back to Chile, her life is changed and she almost forgets the tragedy from Chinatown, which appears only in her nightmares and she is able to consciously remember it only many years later.
The story is not limited to the grandparents; Aurora's uncle Severo and his wife, Nivea, are also richly described, strong characters who play important roles in her life. There are many secondary personas whose attributes are unusual, even if merely for the anegdotical purpose. Their fates are inseparably connected with the historical events occurring in their lifetime: the Chinese immigration and the American attitude towards them, their struggle and assimilation; the dictatorship and wars in Chile; finally, the feminist movement, or the souffrage, which is especially important in this novel, as it is discussed, and at the same time accepted and contested by showing the contrast between Nivea, a woman who argues the most for it, has the mind open wide, firm beliefs and goals which she achieves, but she is the one who leads the very traditional life in comparison to Paulina and Eliza, who, a generation older, fulfill their dreams as freely as the women of our times, but do not give a thought to feminism.
The story goes past Aurora's birth and childhood and in the last part of the book concentrates on Aurora herself, her passion for photography, her marriage and loves.
My favorite male characters are Severo and Tao Chi'en, probably because of their wisdom and good characters, which do not diminish their masculinity and charm, natural, although not actively pursued (as opposed to the pathetic Matias Rodriguez de Santa Cruz).
The main difference I see between Allende and other South American writers is that her prose is soaked with femininity, very sensual, its magic comes from the belief in intuition, supported by wisdom and strength. The women in "Portrait in Sepia" are equally colorful and varied characters as men, and all the characters are very human, with their vices and strong points, nobody is a total villain or saint. The importance of romance and love which can be destructive or move the mountains, which can be misplaced or very well chosen, is central to this novel, as well as the passion for things other than love, which is essential to the well-being and internal equilibrium and the only thing besides love which can bring happiness and sense of fulfillment.
I meant to tackle Allende's prose for a long time, and this is the first novel of hers, that I finally read - and definitely not the last one.
« RSS Feeds
