OF LOVE AND SHADOWS
Isabel Allende
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
274 pp., $17.95
Isabel Allende's first novel, The House of Spirits (New York: Knopf, 1985), was remarkably successful - translated into thirteen languages and a best-seller in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although much influenced by the great Latin American masters of "magical realism," especially Garcia Marquez, the novel is a vivid and compelling family saga set in an unnamed Latin American country (clearly Chile). One looked forward to the author's next novel in which she might be confident enough to move beyond the influence of other writers and create a truly original work about her country. Unfortunately, Of Love and Shadows is not that book.
The title is an indication of the author's intent: the conflict between good (i.e., love) and evil (i.e., shadows). She has stressed her intent in various interviews about this novel: "I feel that life is made of light and shadows," and "between love and violence there is a light/shadow contrast," and finally: "The commitment of Latin American writers today is to tell the story of Latin America and its problems, to present these problems in black and white...so that all the world can see them." But it is precisely this didactic, prescriptive black-white dichotomy imposed by the author and her omniscient narrator over plot and characters that makes Of Love and Shadows as sentimental and predictable as the most romantic of Gothic novels. The debased progeny of this nineteenth-century genre is read avidly today by millions of women, a phenomenon known in the book trade as "pulp romances" and in Spanish as novelas rosas. "Ever since I translated novelas rosas, I have wanted to write about a young and beautiful couple who thoroughly love one another." Well, she has done so. Her beautiful young protagonist, Irene Beltran, is a woman of such goodness and courage that next to her, poor Jane Eyre looks positively shrewish, and wild Cathie Earnshaw is a wimp. Irene's devotion to the inanimate and animate world is especially evident in her tender treatment of flowers, animals, old folks, children, servants, the poor, prostitutes, homosexuals, peasants, and all other categories of the weak and unfortunate. The novel's young hero, Francisco Leal, is even more noble, selfless and sensitive than Irene because of his family. In contrast to Irene, who has a social-climbing middle-class mother and a decadent, oligarch father (a category known in Spanish as venido a menos), Francisco belongs to nonsocial-climbing, lower middle-class family of extraordinarily idealistic and self-sacrificing Spanish Republican exiles. The two young people work for a women's magazine, she as reporter, he as photographer. Irene is altogether oblivious to the depredations of the military dictatorship that rules her country, but Francisco is involved in the resistance. Together they discover a monstrous crime committed by the country's rulers, a sealed mine shaft filled with the remains of the desaparecidos, the "disappeared" victims of the military dictatorship. After a vicious assassination attempt on Irene, which she survives, the novel ends with the young people outwitting the goon squads, escaping into exile across the Andes, and promising "we will return, we will return."
No one disputes the facts of recent Chilean history - that people were persecuted, tortured, and killed by the military. My quarrel is not with these facts but with the author's portrayal of them.
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