My Goodreads and Amazon reviews of Violeta by Isabel Allende (Rating 3) – Mechanical Realism. Violeta by Isabel Allende is an epistolary novel written by a 100-year-old woman to someone we learn midway through the book is her grandson. (This revelation is not a spoiler; Allende creates neither mystery nor curiosity about the correspondent’s identity.) Spanning a century from the Spanish flu to COVID, the book promises to explore a woman’s evolution from spoiled rich girl to women’s rights activist. Alas, this opportunity is squandered. Instead, readers slog through a dispassionate chronology of marriages and affairs, motherhood, business acumen, national horrors, and global tragedies. Violeta is emotionally flat. She has no lasting regrets, no festering wounds. Her joys are evanescent, her victories vicarious. Allende, known for writing mesmerizing novels of magic realism, has instead written an expository account of the abuses of an unnamed right-wing Latin American regime. Readers meet a multiplying cast of characters, but only a few are memorable. As a writer of historical fiction myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I know that to entice readers to imagine themselves in another time and place, an author must immerse them in the lives of fully imagined people. Allende’s Violeta keeps both characters and readers at a distance.
