Book No. 62 of 2020
(Confession: This book only made it onto my list because I caught sight of its *gorgeous* foil-stamped cover in a London bookshop. Design is truly powerful.)
I was not prepared for how much I loved this book. Allende’s writing here is not what I would call especially beautiful, but it is very direct and feels so deeply personal that you can’t help but fall in love with her characters and feel connected to real historical figures like Pablo Neruda and Salvador Allende. There were so many moments where I couldn’t put my e-reader down, and by the end I was really emotional just reflecting on the journeys the characters had taken.
One really, surprisingly striking thing to me was how much I saw our current times reflected in the political environment depicted by Allende during the Spanish Civil War and the lead up to and aftermath of Pinochet’s coup in Chile. It was, oddly, a relief to see that our current political leaders did not invent the level of awful they’ve created, though it’s also really disheartening to realize that we keep reliving history without learning from our mistakes. I kept stopping short to marvel at how familiar some descriptions of the political atmosphere felt.
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This book reminded me strongly of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko—another saga shaped by immigration and political conflict that traces the unfurling of world events through the lives of its protagonists.