Review: Violeta

Violeta by Isabel Allende
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While not being one of those readers who decides to read books that follow the theme of the month, this one fits March, womens' month, perfectly. Violeta is born in Chile to wealthy parents during the 1920 influenza pandemic. She is pampered and surrounded by loving family, parents, a brother, aunts and a governess whom she adores. There are older siblings as well but they are so much older they are out of the home and not particularly close to her or Jose Antonio, her brother. When the Depression strikes the Del Valle family and her father commits suicide, the rest of them move to a rural area and the home of Miss Taylor's lover's family, the Rivas. Although Jose Antonio is madly in love with Josephine Taylor she is in a relationship with Theresa Rivas. Through the many years covered in this book Jose retains the engagement ring he bought for Miss Taylor.

Which brings us to the length of the story. It covers Violeta life until her death at 100 in 2020, the beginning, as she points out, of yet another pandemic! It is written in the form of a memoir that in time is revealed to be a long letter to Violeta's grandson. Her life as a business woman at a time when women were to be wives and mothers, housekeepers not independently wealthy individuals. She is headstrong and emotional and passionate. Married to a non-Chilean, a German , at a fairly young age. Fabian is madly in love with her but is stoic and unemotional. She is content and expects to be with him until death. That is until julian Bravo comes along and she leaves him for the wild and daring pilot who sweeps her off her feet at first sight.

Theirs is a long involvement, tempetuous, damaging, at times physically abusive which produces two children, a girl, Nieves and a boy, Juan Martin. It is during this time that Violeta becomes more aware of the events occuring in her country and the world. The military juntas of South America, the poverty of her fellow Chileans, the abusive conditions under which some women live, the corruption of government and the rise of organized crime. All of these things we see and hear through the eyes of Violeta, the narrator.

How she reacts to these events. How her children's lives develop and the affects those developments have on her. The birth of her grandson, the evolution of her relationship with Bravo, the new lovers who enter her life as she ages--all of these are revealed. And in the end her loss as time goes on of her family members and friends, her development of a fund for abused women, her philanthropy and her devotion to Camilo, her grandson to whom this letter is written. It is a long letter about a long life but it is a wonderful life, a typical life--there is love, hate, loss, mistakes, revenge, devotion, success and failure--and the longer it goes on the more is lost until in the end, there is just Violeta on her deathbed, Camilo tending her along with one last member of the Rivas household,, the granddaughter of the original housekeeper.

Loved it all--the history, the characters, and Violeta, only 20 years older than me. I felt as though I'd moved into her skin there was so much of her I could relate to. At times I wanted to pull the reins and stop her taking a path I knew would be dangerous or foolhardy, but I could not. I had to let the story go, shaking my head either in sorrow or else with laughter because I'd been as foolish as she at times. The book is wonderful for anyone to read but, I think, will be most appealing to women of a certain age because it will not be so much history of another time as a story of a time through which they have lived.

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