A long petal of the sea, by Isabel Allende

I loved Allende’s first and probably most famous novel, The house of the spirits.  I have read several later ones as well, but I have never found that she equaled that first amazing book.  The title of her latest book, which refers to the shape of his home country, Chile, is a line by Pablo Neruda, the famous poet and Nobel Laureate.  He figures in the novel as well, as a revolutionary, poet, and diplomat.  It was as a diplomat that Neruda financed a boat called the Winnipeg which he used to transport Republican refugees from concentration camps in France after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War.  In this fictional retelling of the event, among these refugees are Victor Dalmau, who although not fully trained served as a doctor, and Roser, the pregnant fiancée of his brother, Guillem, who has died in the conflict.  To emigrate, the two must marry.  It is a historical novel, with the emphasis on historical.  One learns a great deal about the Spanish Civil War, the Winnipeg’s journey, the political climate in Chile, and the rise of Pinochet.  Being sadly ignorant of much of this history, I had to keep looking things up, which made the book more interesting as history than fiction.  As Roser and Victor spend the next half-century in their arranged marriage, moving from Spain, to France, to Chile, to Venezuela and back to Chile, they come to love one another deeply.  But to some extent, their story is merely window-dressing for Allende’s deeper interest in the events that shape them.  318 pp.