'Portrait in Sepia' (Isabel Allende)

I have just finished reading this wonderful novel and I am totally under the spell of the style and the characters in the book. I borrowed it from one of the participants of the  'Spanish - Conversation and Culture' class I attend each week. I assumed that I would not be returning it for a few weeks as I was in the middle of reading other books at the time. I couldn't have been more wrong. The moment I opened the book and immersed myself in reading the first few pages my attention shifted - I put aside all the other books, to read them later. I simply had to continue reading the 'Portrait...' It didn't take me long - I simply 'swallowed' it (I mean I read it very quickly).

Sitting on my sofa at home with a cup of coffee or tea in one hand and the book in the other, I was transferred to the 19th century San Francisco (US) and  Chile (with a quick visit to London and Paris). The story takes place before, during and after the War of the Pacific up until the first decade of the 20th century. A family saga with the most colourful, powerful and unpredictable characters one can imagine. Aurora del Valle is the narrator in the book. She describes her upbringing and the stories of her maternal and paternal relatives. Yet, not everything is revealed straight away as she does not actually know for a very long time who her parents were. She is in a strong need for closure and slowly over the years she keeps on finding out .... Aurora, suffers from terrible nightmares where people in black pyjamas appear. In the last pages the horrible truth behind the black-pyjamas people is revealed.

Aurora was brought up by her paternal grandmother - Paulina del Valle - a huge-in-size business-orientated extremely-rich matron with the most interesting and headstrong personality - firstly in San Francisco then in Chile.  Her paternal grandmother was Chilean. Her maternal grandparents were Chilean and Chinese, but she could not remember them since she had lived with them only until she was 5. Throughout her life she missed her Chinese grandfather emotionally (as if there was a huge hole in her)even though her little head could not remember him physically (and she did not even know for a very long time he even existed) - as a little girl she had had such a strong wonderful bond with him that it affected all her life.
In my opinion Tao Chi (Aurora's Chinese grandfather) is the most beautiful character here - with his eagerness to help people (he had an acupuncture clinic in San Francisco), wonderful love for his wife, his children and Aurora, and humble yet noble personality and dis-attachment to material things (as for whatever money he could save he would buy young slave-prostitutes from the brothels of china town to set them free and give them chance of a descent life). There are many other brilliantly portrayed personalities: Paulina del Valle, her English butler Williams (later her second husband!), Severo del Valle (who married Aurora's mother when she was pregnant), and Nivea - second wife of Severo (with whom she had 15 children!)...

I am definitely going to read more of Isabel Allende.  I already have one of her books on my Kindle and there are plenty in the local library. I might even treat myself to one or two of her books in original Spanish.

 

Quotes:

 

" 'I'm going to die' I screamed, throwing myself on her.

  ' This is not a convenient time to do that,' my grandmother replied dryly."

(Aurora just discovered she was bleeding (menstruating) for the first time, on the same day Civil War broke out)

" 'You already lost one leg in the war, Severo; if you lose the other, you'll look like a dwarf'.
'I don't have any choice, I'd be killed in Santiago anyway.'
'Don't be so melodramatic, this isn't the opera!' "
(conversation between Severo and his aunt Paulina before he left for another war - he indeed had lost one leg in the previous war)

" 'A printing press? Here? In my house?' my grandmother bawled.
  'I'm afraid so, Aunt,' murmured Nivea.
  'Shit! What will we do now!' And the matriarch fell back into her chair with her head in her hands, muttering that her own family had betrayed her, that we were going to pay the price for such incomparable idiocy, that we were imbeciles, (...)

"Since she was always pregnant. Nivea never relied on counting days but calculated instead the proximity of the coming delivery by the number of times she used the chamber pot. When for two nights in a row she got up thirteen times, she announced at breakfast that it was time to send for a doctor, and in fact her contractions began that same day."

"He was breathing, but his soul was already travelling through other dimensions. 'Good-bye, Papa,' I told him. It was the first time I had called him that. He agonized for two days more, and at the dawn of the third day he died like a baby chick."
(death of Aurora's father - she found out he was her father only a couple of months before)

" 'Light is the language of photography, the soul of the world. There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain,' Don Juan Ribero told me seventeen years ago during the lesson he gave that fist day in his studio on the Plaza de Armas."