Adventures in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

Posted on March 25, 2013 by pagesofjulia

adventuresI have a friend named Fil who won’t stop bringing me books. I’ve told him how badly my reading is backlogged, but still we can’t have dinner or a drink without bringing me a book, or several. There are worse problems to have. He certainly does a fine job of selecting them, there’s no question about that; I just worry about finding time for them all. This one, however, fit perfectly into a hole in my reading at the time it arrived: I was a little behind and needed a quick read to review for you all here when he brought me this small, slim paperback of 119 pages. Perhaps it’s wrong to choose one’s reading based on length! but sometimes it does go that way. So, enter Isabella Bird.

From a brief bio in the opening pages, I learned that she was born in 1831 in England, and was sickly and in poor health for the first 40 years of her life, until she traveled to Hawaii and climbed a volcano. From there, she realized that outdoor activity was much more her style than were British sickrooms, and she embarked on a different lifestyle. Adventures in the Rocky Mountains is a collection of letters (and excerpts from letters) she sent to a sister back home while tramping around the Rockies, then not yet a part of the United States but a frontier dominated by hard drinking, hard living, and men.

Bird’s writing is remarkable for its lovely, evocative descriptions of natural scenery, as well as its equally evocative, but less praising, descriptions of frontier life. She retains some disdain for the uncivilized dress and manners of some of her neighbors, but before we call her prudish we will note that she was “bagging 14ers” in a time and place when women were scarce, and were hardworking frontier wives rather than adventurers. In other words, despite preferring a well-dressed conversationalist as companion to a ragged and “coarse” one, she was a tough cookie. A quotation from one of her letters graces the front cover: “There’s nothing Western folk admire so much as pluck in a woman…”

Aside from the descriptions of natural beauty and frontier life, I found a third reason to recommend this book: the character of Mr Nugent or ‘Jim’ (never referred to without the ‘single quotation marks’!), and his dog ‘Ring’ (also always so designated). ‘Mountain Jim’ is a well-known ruffian and desperado with no end of violence and criminality in his past – he confides in Bird at one point such atrocities that she can’t bring herself to relate them. But he is also a perfect gentleman, apparently, in the right mood. He is a “countryman” of Bird’s, a wonderful conversationalist, and quite chivalrous as well as respectful of her abilities to be one of the guys. He is described as charmingly as are the Rocky Mountains. For that matter, the less prominent Evans (another very likeable but also alcoholic and problematic frontiersman) gets a similarly colorful character sketch; and the UNlikeable Lyman as well; so really I should add characterization of people generally to Bird’s list of literary talents.

I am going to stop telling you and show you, through a few choice passages, below.

on a sunset:

The sun was setting fast, and against his golden light green promontories, wooded with stately pines, stood out one beyond another in a medium of dark rich blue, while grey bleached summits, peaked, turreted, and snow-slashed, were piled above them, gleaming with amber light. Darker grew the blue gloom, the dew fell heavily, aromatic odours floated on the air, and still the lofty peaks glowed with living light, till in one second it died off from them, leaving them with the ashy paleness of a dead face. It was dark and cold under the mountain shadows, the frosty chill of the high altitude wrapped me round, the solitude was overwhelming, and I reluctantly turned my horse’s head towards Truckee, often looking back to the ashy summits in their unearthly fascination.

on ‘Jim’:

Heavily loaded as all our horses were, ‘Jim’ started over the half-mile of level grass at a hand-gallop, and then throwing his mare on her haunches, pulled up alongside of me, and with a grace of manner which soon made me forget his appearance, entered into a conversation which lasted for more than three hours, in spite of the manifold checks of fording streams, single file, abrupt ascents and descents, and other incidents of mountain travel.

on a sunrise, and the lightening of the world:

There were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening and etherealising, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden glory pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of absolute purity, an occasional foreground of cottonwood and aspen flaunting in red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the pines, the trickle and murmur of streams fringed with icicles, the strange sough of gusts moving among the pine tops – sights and sounds not of the lower earth, but of the solitary, beast-haunted, frozen upper altitudes.

on a high mountain lake:

I thought how their clear cold waters, growing turbid in the affluent flats, would heat under the tropic sun, and eventually form part of that great ocean river which renders our far-off islands habitable by impinging on their shores.

on society, even where people are scarce:

…in truth, this blue hollow, lying solitary at the foot of Long’s Peak, is a miniature world of great interest, in which love, jealousy, hatred, envy, pride, unselfishness, greed, selfishness, and self-sacrifice can be studied hourly, and there is always the unpleasantly exciting risk of an open quarrel with the neighbouring desperado, whose “I’ll shoot you!” has more than once been heard in the cabin.

Isabella Bird’s story of travel through Colorado Territory in the 1870’s, told in letters to her sister, spans almost precisely three months in time; but it is a lifetime of beautiful, incisive, gorgeously told observations, and we are lucky to have them today.

Rating: 7 breaths of rarefied air.

As usual, thanks Fil!

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (audio): first half

Posted on March 21, 2013 by pagesofjulia

hunchbackThis is a long book, and listening to it as an audiobook makes it longer still. I’ve been at it a week and a half now and am not quite halfway through, so I thought it might be appropriate to break it into two reviews – to remind myself, as much as anything else.

I will not devote too much space to plot synopsis here; this work has plenty of presence in the public consciousness and a rather thorough Wikipedia article as well. The story within the book most centrally concerns Quasimodo, the eponymous hunchback, and Esmeralda, a beautiful young gypsy woman with several admirers. While the story revolves around these two protagonists and their eventual fates, its range is much larger than that. Between events in the lives of Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and the other characters who effect their stories, Hugo describes the architecture of Paris (note the prominence of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the title and in the story) and the history of both the city and its architecture. He connects changes and trends in architecture to changes in culture, and thereby tells a larger story than just that of his characters; this is also a book about Paris and its people in history.

It can get a little dry. I find this reading (listening) experience to be mixed: at its best, Hugo is hilarious, dry, droll, witty, and sketches people and scenes charmingly. At its drier moments, however, my mind wanders as he describes architecture (I confess, not a particular area of personal interest) and the various period styles involved in the Cathedral, etc. I can blank out on this book for 30 minutes at a time, and I am not highly motivated to fight it; I just let Hugo’s words wash over me, gathering the main effect, and wait for Esmeralda et al to reappear and entertain me. While I am a fan of some forms of narrative within descriptive or didactic ramblings (The Perfect Storm being the perfect example of this done beautifully), this is not one of the more effective or enjoyable versions I’ve come across.

The narrator of this version, David Case, has what I assume to be a fine French accent (that is my mother’s area, not mine), but its nasal, whinging nature can be a little trying. I don’t want to give the impression that I am impatient or annoyed with this book (or this narration) on balance; but I do have some criticisms, you see. I turned it off for a few days in favor of MUSIC (what a joy!), but I was glad to get back to it.

I think this is a great story, and a great point of cultural reference, and I am getting some (needed, and appreciated) education on French culture. I am enjoying it – particularly the narrative parts. It takes a little patience and forbearance – a little more than a faster-paced story would – but I believe it will be worth it. More a Dickens than a Lee Child, you see.

Have you read The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Or do you have any other experiences with similar classics: medium-lengthy, verbose and descriptive, a little challenging but worthwhile?

Rating: I’m going to finish it before I judge.

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Ramblers: Loyola Chicago 1963: The Team that Changed the Color of College Basketball by Michael Lenehan

Posted on March 20, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A dynamic, emotional study of one college basketball team’s role in the civil rights movement.

ramblers
Michael Lenehan’s Ramblers chooses one college basketball team, and one season, to illustrate a sea change in the sport–and in the United States. The Loyola Chicago team of 1963 was not the first to send black and white players out on the court together, but Lenehan makes an excellent case for the significance of this particular team’s actions at a key moment in the national struggle for civil rights. He examines their competition over the course of the season, focusing on two teams in particular: Mississippi State, whose players had to sneak out of state due to a ban on playing teams with nonwhite members, and Cincinnati, which was also an integrated team, but one with an increasingly antiquated playing style.

Relying on primary sources and interviews to study a handful of individual players, coaches and administrators, Ramblers passionately evokes the beauty of a great game in a time of great change, and works as a metaphor for changes taking place across the nation as well. Lenehan handles the game with an ease and comfort that indicate his expertise, and Ramblers combines his passion for basketball with an intimately detailed history–including a deeply moving digression into the 1962 riots at Oxford, Miss. Lenehan eventually follows each of his subjects through to the present (or the ends of their lives), giving Ramblers a feeling of completeness. Throughout, he maintains a sense of fun appropriate to a book that’s ultimately about the antics of college kids.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the March 19, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 fast breaks.

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The Prisoners by Guy de Maupassant

Posted on March 18, 2013 by pagesofjulia

demaupassantPerhaps the best and the worst of The Prisoners is that it is like the other de Maupassant short stories I have read. This is to say that it is finely crafted with great attention to detail and wonderful expressiveness in very few words; it is also to say that it covers more of the same ground as I have seen in other of his work. That is, it is about the Prussian invasion and occupation of France in the Franco-Prussian War, and it highlights the honor and resourcefulness – and occasional corruptness and idiocy – of the French.

In this story, a young woman who is “daughter and wife of a forester” is home alone with her mother. The daughter’s wife is serving in the French army; the father is in town drilling with the local militia. This young woman is strong and unafraid. When half a dozen Germans show up demanding to be fed dinner, she tricks them into her cellar – once, apparently, an underground prison cell – until the local militia can come to take them into custody. The young woman is represented as a fine example of patriotism, courage, and quick wits; the French should be proud of her (and her father certainly is, although it is implied that the leader of the militia is happy to take credit for the capture). The militiamen, however, don’t get an uncritical treatment. I will leave this part spoiler-free, but an unfortunate and avoidable incident highlights that they are less competent than our daughter-and-wife.

This is yet another brief, effective short story from de Maupassant, who likes to both praise and expose his countrymen and -women for their behaviors during the Franco-Prussian War. He’s one of the very finest short story writers I’ve read, for his incisive use of language and imagery. Another winner.

Rating: 7 pumps.

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Something Rising (Light and Swift) by Haven Kimmel (audio)

Posted on March 14, 2013 by pagesofjulia

somethingrisingSomething Rising (Light and Swift) was an amazing audio listening experience. I was transfixed, and need to go looking for more Haven Kimmel immediately.

This is the story of a girl named Cassie, whom we meet at, oh, ten years of age and follow until she is about 30. Her mother is from New Orleans but as a young girl followed a handsome pool player named Jimmy to a little town in Indiana, where they married. They had two daughters, Belle and Cassie, but Jimmy was a bad choice from the start, never sticking around long, mostly continuing to shack up with his prior fiance. He’s not a terribly good father to the girls, but through him Cassie learns to worship the pool table he plays on. It’s not Jimmy but his brother, Cassie’s Uncle Bud, who teaches her to play; and this is how she makes her living, supplemented by the odd day labor.

The fact that Cassie is an extraordinary pool player is not the point of her story, although it does help define her personality and her tendency to be roughly competitive. Her appreciation for geometry and order help her make sense of the world. She is also a handywoman, outdoorsy, and a good and generous friend if not loquacious. Early in life she worships Jimmy, but that will change.

Cassie reminded me of the protagonist of Once Upon a River. Both young women are untameable and live by their own rules on the edge of the civilized world. Both are sensitive and vulnerable despite being strong and capable. Laura, Cassie’s mother, is a proud, damaged Southern belle out of a Tennessee Williams play, but stronger; Belle, Cassie’s older sister, goes quite nuts under the strain of Jimmy’s failures and Laura’s anger. Laura and Belle are literary women, and Cassie by contrast feels that she is not, but she does awfully much reading & writing (partly to communicate with her mother and sister) for a woman without literary leanings of her own. I think this is something she doesn’t see in herself, but it’s there.

The story is full of drab, flat, gray American landscape and the ennui of the working class upon it, which is also a somewhat familiar theme; but it’s evoked so crisp-and-clearly, so beautifully, that it took my breath away. I shared a teaser with you the other day, but I couldn’t stop collecting more exemplary turns of phrase:

  • “Every day was a vaccination.”
  • “‘Howdy’ was always ironic, except when it became a habit. And then it was the speaker’s entire life that descended into irony, and later into self-parody. Cassie studied Wally’s face in profile but couldn’t tell where he stood.”
  • “Cassie was the daughter of a great romance, if what was meant by romance was wreckage.”
  • “CDs instead of records, but the songs she wanted to hear: if that didn’t sum up the struggle.”

A large part of what I loved about this book was Cassie, her story, the strange sad beauty of her life & her world; but another large part was the lovely way with words that Kimmel employs. This book is a poem. And the audio reading was divine as well: Chelsey Rives renders Laura’s New Orleans accent, Belle’s nervous worryings, and Cassie’s clipped tones perfectly. I didn’t want this book to end, not least because I wanted to know what happened next, but also because I wanted to hear Chelsey tell me more about the sultry Gulf Coast and the knockings of the pool balls at Uncle Bud’s.

Something Rising (Light and Swift) is a sad story, but with all the dignified grace of the greatest sad stories, and although Tennessee Williams peeks out here and there, there’s far more hope in Cassie’s world than there is in TW’s: this is also a coming-of-age story, and ends with a possible future. I wish I could follow Cassie into it.

Clearly I loved this book, and recommend the audio highly. And… I’m off to find more Haven Kimmel.

Rating: 9 cigarettes.

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Released by Amber Polo

Posted on March 11, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Full disclosure: This book was sent to me by the author, who very astutely offered me dog treats with it for my two babes and therefore got in the door easily. Great trick, Amber!

releasedLiberty Cutter is a librarian recently returned to her hometown of Shipsfeather, Ohio, having taken the position of public library Director. She’s there to learn more about her own history and that of the town; ever since her mother abandoned her at age 5 in the children’s section of the local library, she’s had precious little information about her background and family. (She was raised by four law librarian aunts who apparently lacked any sense of fun.) Shipsfeather is a strange place: no one in town wants to talk about the past. As the book opens, Liberty dashes off to a massive fire that destroys her library. City officials are less than helpful, but she ends up reopening in an beautiful old school building, with the help of the friendly townspeople and her excellent staff. It turns out that her new library building was already occupied! Underground from the old Academy lives a pack of dogshifters, who it turns out are humankind’s original librarians, and are pleasantly disposed towards Liberty. And it’s a good thing, because the werewolves are the enemies of librarians everywhere – book burners, no less! I’ll mostly quit here for the sake of spoilers, but: Liberty makes new friends, and the library gets a fresh and healthier new start.

The first in a series, Released is great fun, if you’re a fan of books, dogs, or libraries (preferably all three). It does rely heavily on the reader’s appreciation of these framing elements, but this doesn’t concern me overmuch, because I doubt many people pick up such a book who aren’t. Shipsfeather is full of library references: “thank Dewey,” Liberty thinks, when things go right; certain characters talk in “Dewey-speak” (substituting Dewey numbers for nouns). This idyllic small town has far more enthusiastic librarians and library patrons than seems realistic, but again, we’re happy to forgive. The dogshifters in the basement are named and described by breed (and their country of origin plays an important role, too), in another instance of casual indulgence in our mutual interests. The chihuahua is, of course, my favorite character (and he shares a name with a major Mexican beer!).

There is plenty to like: the fantasy is clever and cute, the characters are likeable in their eccentricities, and again, there’s plenty of dog- and library-play. There is some romance, of the swooning and weak-kneed, he’s-so-handsome-and-strong variety. It’s all “clean.” I could make a few criticisms, too. The plot and fantasy realm is not terribly complex; this is a light-hearted romp, not a world-building feat. The dialogue can be a little tedious and unreal. Phrases like “even so” don’t feel right in dialogue, and likewise the lack of contractions: “I will do everything I can” in informal speech. The humor is heavy on the puns – not a problem for every reader, but noteworthy.

Released is easy-reading fun, not crafted in high literary style but a worthwhile jaunt. I enjoyed it, despite a few stylistic flaws, and found myself thinking about the sweet characters and the sweet little world of Shipsfeather as I fell asleep one night this week; and they made me smile. And that’s always worth a few points.

Rating: 5 liver treats.

Thanks, Amber, for sending me a copy of your book.

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The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

Posted on March 8, 2013 by pagesofjulia

An evocative view of the Manhattan Project through the eyes of the women who worked and lived in the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tenn.

atomic

Oak Ridge, Tennessee was born in the fall of 1942, but would remain unknown until August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Oak Ridge, or “Site X,” housed factories for the enrichment of uranium. The workers at those factories at their peak numbered some 75,000, living in a secret city and working on they knew not what.

Diverse young women traveled from around the country fill the jobs needed to help win a war. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City is a unique glimpse into their strange experience of working on a project whose nature was kept from them. Most expected to leave Oak Ridge as soon as the war was won, but many stayed on for decades. Due to the fine supply of handsome young men in uniform, a number of Kiernan’s subjects would make families and homes there.

Based on interviews with their now-elderly subjects, the stories of Jane the statistician, Virginia the chemist, Kattie the janitor and many more are vivid and human in Kiernan’s telling. The focus of the book briefly zooms out for the dropping of the bomb, visiting Truman’s White House during the decision-making process, but then plunges back into Oak Ridge, where women who tested for leaks in pipes and kept tanks clean were rocked by the revelation of what they’d contributed to. Kiernan melds hard science and history with the moving stories of women caught in events bigger than themselves, whose experiences and whose work changed the world irrevocably. The result is a compelling and unusual new perspective on the Manhattan Project and World War II.

This review originally ran in the March 5, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

While I am always constrained by the limited space available for reviews in Shelf Awareness (you know I can get wordy!), this book was especially difficult to boil down, touching as it does on women’s issues, history, science, working conditions, civil rights, war and ethics… It could be compared to Soundings or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in its intersection of hard science with the creative, feeling portrayal of women’s lives. Additionally, Kiernan’s use of primary sources – interviews with survivors of the era – made me pause to think of my grandfather, a WWII veteran who’s over 90 years old now, whose memories will someday be lost to us. This is a fine book on an interesting subject and I just had to say a few more words to that effect.

Rating: 8 acronyms.

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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson (audio)

Posted on March 7, 2013 by pagesofjulia

gardenAs the title indicates, this is a creepy work of nonfiction. Erik Larson, popular author of (among other things) The Devil in the White City, here tackles the subject of one American family living in Berlin in the years leading up to World War II. William E. Dodd was an unassuming professor of history in Chicago in the early 1930’s, wishing for a little more free time to finish his life’s work, a 4-volume history of “the Old South.” He lobbied Roosevelt, through his modest political connections, for a quiet diplomat’s post to somewhere like Belgium or the Netherlands. There he hoped to settle down to finish his books and not have to do too much real diplomatic work, to which he readily confessed he was not well suited. Instead, owing to a strange combination of forces – mostly, no one else being willing to take the post – he was appointed to be the United States’ diplomat to Berlin in 1933. He traveled to Hitler’s Germany with his wife and grown son, Bill Jr., both of whom play almost no role in the story, and with his grown daughter, Martha, who stars next to the elder Dodd himself.

William E. Dodd is a conscientious man, rather to the point of annoyance. His sense of humor is wry and not well appreciated in diplomatic circles. He comes from a modest background and lives on a professor’s salary, and now a diplomat’s, which is quite moderate; in Berlin he plans to live within the bounds of that salary, which is the first time he offends protocol, but not the last. As Larson explains, diplomats are traditionally wealthy men of great style – valets, fancy chauffeured cars, fine wines, grand balls and the like – and make up what Larson quotes one diplomat as calling a “pretty good club.” Dodd will fail to fit into this club, and will, to the aggravation of all, criticize it throughout his tenure.

Martha is a sultry young woman very comfortable with her charms and her ability to wield her sexuality as a weapon against the men in her world; she enjoys men, and sex, and is in the process of ending a secret marriage even when she sets sail for Germany. When she gets there, she is charmed by the Nazis, handsome and blonde and polite and uniformed, and is not unhappy to be characterized as a “little Nazi” herself. Among the lovers we assume she took in Germany (Larson points out what we don’t know for sure, but makes a strong case) are a Gestapo leader, a French diplomat, a close assistant to Hitler, and eventually a Russian diplomatic assistant who turns out to be a Soviet spy. She is even at one point asked to be “Hitler’s woman,” and introduced to him, but nothing comes of it (not for lack of her attraction to the man of power, however). By the end of the Dodds’ years in Berlin, however, she has noted the evils of the Third Reich and flirts with becoming a spy for Stalin, herself.

Larson’s fine work here is in bringing a time and a place to life, and it raises goosebumps. Hitler’s Berlin is chilling, in large part because we, the modern readers, have the benefit of hindsight, and it is deeply disturbing to watch humanly flawed men and women walk around that time and place without realizing just how bad things are going to get. There is willful ignorance, naturally, as well as antisemitism in varying degrees: the Dodds share this prejudice with many of their contemporaries, and it helps them to excuse Hitler’s regime longer than they should… but again, this is all with the 20/20 vision we possess today. It’s difficult to imagine the tolerance shown by the United States, and Dodd, and the world, for Hitler; but this is history.

The decision to showcase Martha alongside Dodd was a fine one. They are two very different characters, both tending to minimize Germany’s faults at the start of the story but both (very differently) eventually coming to understand and fear the changes to come. When the Dodds left Berlin in 1937, the United States were yet years from a war with Germany, but Dodd had begun to prophecy some of the terrors to come.

Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts (poetically named for the literal translation of Tiergarten, a garden & neighborhood in Berlin where the Dodds lived) is to my tastes a great way to read history. The story electrifies, brings the past to life, and promises to faithfully follow the sources available. An enjoyable and worthwhile, if unnerving, read (or listen).

Rating: 7 breaches of protocol.

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Vera Gran: The Accused by Agata Tuszyńska, trans. by Charles Ruas

Posted on March 4, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The unanswered questions surrounding the life of a lounge singer in the ghettos of Warsaw, as seen through the gauze of memory.

veragran

Vera Gran was a wildly popular Jewish lounge singer in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. In 2007, she died in an apartment in Paris–filthy, claustrophobic, paranoid and hateful. For decades, despite being found innocent by several tribunals, she had faced accusations of collaboration with the Gestapo.

Agata Tuszyńska was 19 when her mother, also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, first told her she was Jewish. In her approach to a profoundly sad and traumatized old woman, Tuszyńska seeks the truth but realizes it cannot be pinned down. Vera Gran: The Accused is not a biography, but a shifting portrait of Gran, the Ghetto and survivors’ guilt; it is a contemplation of what we will do (and should do) to survive. Readers unfamiliar with Vera Gran may be more familiar with Wladyslaw Szpilman, the subject of Roman Polanski’s award-winning film The Pianist: Szpilman was Gran’s piano accompanist, but he cut her out of his memoir–later becoming one of her most vocal accusers. The nature of memory and memoir, the power of the stories we tell when those stories outlast memory of the events themselves, becomes a central theme in Tuszyńska’s book.

Charles Ruas’s translation from the French is subtly poetic and adds to the quiet tones of Tuszyńska’s musing as well as Gran’s anger. It is this atmosphere, along with the unknowable questions surrounding Gran, that makes Vera Gran: The Accused a remarkable and memorable contemplation.

This review originally ran in the March 1, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 changed stories.

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Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende (audio)

Posted on February 28, 2013 by pagesofjulia

inesIsabel Allende is mostly a well-respected name to me; I had only read her Daughter of Fortune before this one, and found it interesting and enjoyable, but it doesn’t seem to stand out in my memory. (It’s been years.) I picked up Inés of My Soul as I pick up at least half my audiobooks: opportunistically. Because audio is not as plentiful as hardcopy, I take what I can find, in the library or from friends & family. This one came from my mother, and I’m glad I happened upon it, because I found it fascinating and entertaining.

Inés of My Soul is the story of the founding of Chile, told first-person by Inés de Suárez, a real historical figure; or perhaps more accurately it is the life story of Inés, inextricably tied with the founding of Chile, which she (at least in the novel) considers her life’s work. This is a work of historical fiction; Inés really lived but we don’t know everything about her, so Allende necessarily fills in the gaps.

Inés was born in Extremadura, in Spain, in 1507. She married Juan de Mélaga for love (or for lust), but their marriage was troubled; their fiery sexual passion also led to fierce fights, and they failed to conceive the child Inés wanted, and Juan eventually sailed for the New World in search of gold and fortune. She follows, not out of love for her husband – that was mostly dead – but because, as a “widow of the New World,” her horizons in Extremadura were extremely limited, and she sought adventure just as Juan did. Inés travels around Peru, making her living as she did in Spain: sewing clothes and cooking her famous empanadas, which she is careful to provide to the hungry as well as her paying customers. After learning that Juan is dead, she is plagued by men who desire her, and who intend to have her by any means, with or without her consent; and she picks up a housekeeper who will become a lifelong friend & helpmate, Catalina, an Indian woman skilled in healing and with the power to see the future. Catalina foretells an important man to come into Inés’s life and recognizes him when he does: Pedro de Valdivia, a fellow native of Extremadura and a soldier from a long line of soldiers. Their relationship is full of fire and chemistry, as was her initial time with Juan de Mélaga, but will mature into a deeply loving and cooperative partnership. They will never marry, because Pedro has a wife, Marina, back in Spain, and all three are Catholic.

Pedro and Inés travel together to Chile, an area still unconquered by Europeans and especially intimidating because of an earlier failed attempt. They have a small but mostly loyal cadre of soldiers with them and intend to be the founders of a new country there. As partners they fight the Indians and establish the city of Santiago and several more small towns; they live through good times and bad. There is a fascinating subplot involving a young Indian boy who joins their settlement, which I will leave mostly untouched for the sake of spoilers. After ten years of loving cohabitation, during which Inés contributes substantially to the successful founding of Santiago, even in combat against the Indians, Pedro throws her aside. He has grown from the strong & cooperative man she loved into an aging, arrogant, cruel, unhealthy ruler, but his rejection still hurts. Inés then takes a second husband: Rodrigo de Quiroga, a captain in Pedro’s army and a good man with whom she finds another beautifully healthy and loving relationship, also raising his daughter Isabel, to whom this story is narrated.

Inés of My Soul is the diary of an elderly Inés who wants to record her fascinating and important life for the sake of posterity. She is sad that she never conceived a child, but loves her stepdaughter very much and chides her lovingly throughout this narration. She writes more than half of it herself, but by the end is dictating to Isabel, as her age catches up with her; she says she sees death coming very soon, and is not sad, as she looks forward to joining Rodrigo, her final love of 30 years, recently dead.

Again, this is a story of the conquest and founding of Chile, complete with scenes of battle, heroism, victory, glory, and gold. There is plenty of statement on the evils of colonialism: Inés praises the natives of Chile, respects their choice to fight to the death rather than be enslaved, and notes their strengths. She also laments the unnecessary cruelties of the conquerors, including her Pedro. But it is also very much a love story. Inés has three loves in her life, and I think she is lucky (and considers herself so) to have shared passions with three very different men. While not terribly explicit, there is sex, told in an appropriately heated, sensual tone, with some acknowledgment of Isabel’s presumed discomfort where her father is concerned. (Inés also offers to give Isabel advice, in case the latter’s husband proves overly eager or otherwise fails to give pleasure.)

There are obvious links to Like Water for Chocolate, in the fiery, sensual telling of lust, passion, and fine food in the voice of a strong Latina woman, and in Inés’s implicit feminism when she declares her own place in history and her substantial contributions to the new country of Chile. This is an engrossing tale of a woman’s life, and a country’s birth, intertwined. I loved both Inés – a passionate and strong woman – and the history of Chile. Having grown up in mid-south Texas, I have long had an appreciation of Spanish-speaking cultures; I am most familiar with Mexico but have always been interested in traveling further south too. Chile was on my list – it’s so far away and therefore feels exotic and remote – but now it’s an even higher priority. And reading this fictionalized history of the founding of conquered Chile makes me more interested in its history, too. I did do a little Wikipedia reading on Inés de Suárez, the historical figure, enough to know that she was indeed lover to Pedro de Valdivia and involved in the conquest.

Finally, I cannot stress enough the pleasurable experience of listening to this narrator, Blair Brown, tell this story in a musical, lyrical, emotive, accented voice; there is no other way to enjoy it. Allende renders nuanced, very real characters in a lovely tone (aside from the lovely reading Brown gives); she makes a bloody history of conquest appropriately ambiguous; and the remarkable achievement of blending love and passion with war and subjugation is riveting. I highly recommend this story, and I highly recommend Brown’s reading of it.

Rating: 9 empanadas.

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