Violeta

“There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember” (315).

Isabel Allende’s most recent novel, Violeta, tells the story of the titular character, who has tackled two destructive pandemics: the Spanish Influenza of 1918 and Coronavirus. The novel explores the labyrinthine life Violeta has had, from her family’s struggles with the Great Depression to her many lovers. Intertwined with history and politics of the time, the novel discusses dictatorship, exile, and 20th century women’s rights.

Violeta is told in a slightly disordered order, which perhaps makes the character further realistic, as the entire novel is a letter written to her grandson on her deathbed at a hundred years old. As she herself says, but to her grandson, “You have a terrible memory since you’re always so distracted and that defect gets worse with age” (3).

She flits rapidly from memory to memory, requiring the reader to stay attentive.

The scene she creates is a vivid one; she goes into magnificent detail at the triumphs and sorrows of all motherhood and difficulties in getting a divorce at the time. At the base, however, Violeta is a feminist novel—it tells the story of vastly different intelligent women, from Nieves, Violeta’s daughter, who incites fear in all those around her, to Teresa Rivas, who has been jailed numerous times for her feminist protest yet still persists to gain the right to vote.

As Allende says herself in an interview with PBS, Violeta is a reflection of her mother. “[Violeta] was smart, [a] visionary, [and] talented.” She says that one difference between Violeta and her mother, however, is that her “mom always depended financially on someone.” Violeta builds a housing empire single-handedly, using her brother’s name on documents as women were not allowed certain levels of financial freedom.

One cannot doubt Isabel Allende’s writing prowess. The famous Chilean author marks her 21st novel and forty years worth of book publications. She tends to draw from her own experiences when writing—she too was “exiled” from Chile, similarly to many characters in her novel, after she began to receive death threats. She first rose to fame in 1985, when she published the much acclaimed The House of Spirits.

Violeta ingeniously spans a hundred years, allowing Allende to make distinct connections between the injustices of both past and present.