A Long Petal of the Sea: A Novel
By: Isabel Allende, Nick Caistor, Amanda Hopkinson / Narrated By: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
Fiction with plot devices, imagery, magical lyricism? No. History and Love defined and lived? Yessss!
Lemme put it to you this way: Unless it’s something technical about quantum mechanics? My sister does NOT READ. So waaaay back when, yeeears ago, she said she’d READ the BEST book EVER, and it was NOT quantum mechanics but was a kinda sorta magical mystical historical-ish novel?!? Oh good cow, man: I sooo picked up and read (Yes, back then I was into print) The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. Oh my, it was sooo good. Good enough to where, when I began taking in cats as companions and started naming them? My surliest yet most spiritually courageous girl was immediately dubbed “Isabel” (I still miss her!).
THAT amazing book had, I’m thinking, Big Sis choosing an Isabel Allende effort for this, her Birthday Picks for 2022. You see, Allende, with her deft sense of lyricism and poetry, the interweaving of magical and spiritual with everyday life and history? Dude, she’d set a precedent for herself, and with A Long Petal of the Sea, certainly she captured some of that, yesss?
Well, uhm, no, not really. Long Petal has no magic in it, and I’d not yet started listening to it when Big Sis and I met on her Birthday via FaceTime. Sis seemed a tad doleful, and so I took her at her word that, well? Allende set a verrrrry HIGH bar for herself when she penned The House of the Spirits. She done shot herself in the foot with a magnum opus right outta the chute. So I wandered into A Long Petal of the Sea not knowing what was in store, but feeling like, ah well, can’t hit ‘em all outta the park.
Oh my, how I did love this book!
Each section begins with a Pablo Neruda line, and throughout the story Neruda plays an important part. So score big right there for me, even tho’ I didn’t come to know and appreciate Neruda’s work until 1994’s hit Il Postino (I KNOW! Worse? I dumbly wondered aloud who the heck Neruda was to the erudite best friend I saw it with. Oh how she cringed! I KNOW!).
But what Allende does so very well, aside from her initial forays into magical and mystical, is write some reeeally hard-hitting prose that’s gritty and realistic but is never gratuitously graphic. We open during the Spanish Civil War with one family, particularly with young Victor Dalmau as he works in brutal conditions during war. At first I thought we’d be in for a magical connection as Victor, seeing no hope for a very young wounded man, reaches into the boy’s wounds and massages his heart until it starts beating again. Aha! thought I: Victor has powers over hearts.
Nope. It was just war’s brutality hitting home and Victor doing what he had to do under terrible, terrible, tragic conditions. And then Allende has us off and running with the life of this little family of Republicans fighting for free Spain, against Franco and his violent warfare. In the family home is a thin young woman of peasant stock, Roser, whose keen intellect was seen and cultivated, away from her impoverished family, away from the herds of goats and lack of opportunity of life in the country. Her quietness, her steadfastness, earns her the love of one of the sons, and she loves him in return. But Franco’s coming victory, a certain battle, leave her as very much a young widow, tho’ the two never had the chance to truly marry. Plus, she’s carrying his child, but now they all have to flee.
That’s just the beginning of this book, and Allende chronicles the chaos of people in flight, the hostility of closed borders, the hostility found by those lucky few who have found asylum, immigration camps, concentrations camps, eventual World War, a flight to Chile sponsored by Neruda to build a community of artists, musicians, freethinkers, hard workers in that country.
And of the eventual revolution there as well.
What I found so spectacular and lovely about this book was that this was about being tossed about without mercy by countries, and wars, and people… but finding purpose and meaning through the way we choose to Love, through the way we choose to define Family, through how we choose to decide where Home is. For anyone struggling to make sense of the upheaval and perpetual indignant outrage (At best) of the 21st century, or of the hostility and outright violence (Increasingly the norm)? This was just simply lovely.
Plus for heaven’s sake: Edoardo Ballerini!!! Effortless! So smooth! Such a warm voice! Enchanting women who struggle but “hold up half the sky”; ridiculously hard-headed men who are sometimes tyrannical papas… or aging codgers who are easily swayed by flattery… but who often come through doing some pretty heavy lifting themselves. Ballerini raaaaarely does anything BUT make Wonderful even Better. Bravo!
Nope, no magical realism here. Nope, no enchantment, only that of discovering that a life of shared hardships, shared burdens, shared hopes and dreams IS true love, IS romantic love in its highest most idealized form. It ain’t immediate, and it don’t come easily.
But my GOD, is it beautiful when all is said and done? Especially when Allende pens her final paragraphs, and the loveliest last lines ever.
If you love history, if you love trying to live an honorable life in the midst of chaos, if you love weathering storms and bending bending bending just so you never freaking break? Then, my friend: THIS audiobook is for you. Listen, and?
Vaya con Dios
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