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Island Beneath the Sea
by Isabel Allende (Goodreads Author), Margaret Sayers Peden
by Isabel Allende (Goodreads Author), Margaret Sayers Peden
Claire Grasse's review
Sep 14, 10
Recommended for:
practically no one
Read from August 16 to September 14, 2010
The flyleaf review on this book promised that it was written with all kinds of "native wit and brio." sic. Well, I fear this surfeit of wit and brio was somehow waylaid between press and the bookstand, because I'm halfway through, and now hoping I can find the grim stamina to just hang on and finish this book that somehow manages to feel damp and depressing, even in the cheeriest of chapters.
Allende uses language beautifully. She paints vivid word portraits of places and times I've never been to. Unfortunately, in this book, those portraits are all dark and grim, and echoing with suffering. Plus everything smells bad, if the narrative is to be believed. I'm not a fan of fluffy feel-good literature ALL the time, but jeepers, could we have some BALANCE? If you're going to write nearly 500 pages on the Revolution in Haiti that sprang out of the French Revolution, a spark or two of hope and maybe even happiness might not be amiss in keeping the audience's attention.
Plodding onward, in the interest of finishing what I started. Whether this ever moves from my "currently reading" shelf to my "read" shelf remains to be seen.
Edited to add: I finished it. The last 1/4 of the book was better than anything that came before, and since it redeemed itself I'm bumping it up a star. Still nothing I'd recommend though. It was historically informative, but so dark and... and... CLAMMY feeling that I was left feeling as though I needed to scrape it off my skin. And I'm not a literature professor, so I'm allowed to feel repugnance for books like this. So there.
Allende uses language beautifully. She paints vivid word portraits of places and times I've never been to. Unfortunately, in this book, those portraits are all dark and grim, and echoing with suffering. Plus everything smells bad, if the narrative is to be believed. I'm not a fan of fluffy feel-good literature ALL the time, but jeepers, could we have some BALANCE? If you're going to write nearly 500 pages on the Revolution in Haiti that sprang out of the French Revolution, a spark or two of hope and maybe even happiness might not be amiss in keeping the audience's attention.
Plodding onward, in the interest of finishing what I started. Whether this ever moves from my "currently reading" shelf to my "read" shelf remains to be seen.
Edited to add: I finished it. The last 1/4 of the book was better than anything that came before, and since it redeemed itself I'm bumping it up a star. Still nothing I'd recommend though. It was historically informative, but so dark and... and... CLAMMY feeling that I was left feeling as though I needed to scrape it off my skin. And I'm not a literature professor, so I'm allowed to feel repugnance for books like this. So there.
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drowningmermaid
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rated it 4 stars
Jan 09, 2011 10:50am
Bummer. This is almost exactly how I felt about "House of the Spirits" and I swore off Allende forever. Except, I'm reading this for a book group now. I was hoping against hope that this might not be standard Allende fare-- which is pretty dismal stuff, wrapped in beautiful language. Oh well.
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Dark and clammy is a good description. It's hard for me to read, yet I can't put the book down. I am about halfway through - at the part where they are in Louisiana and I can tell things are going to get bad for Tete once again and I want to stop reading but I can't!
I don't want to dis your perspective, but I am a woman born from relationships told in this story. My great-great-great grandfather was a white slave owner and my great-great-great grandmother his slave. The son born of the union, Etienne Bellerand was taken to live in the 'big house' and named his father's heir. My family is like the one in this story, both the good and the bad and I can tell you reading it was a deeply resonant, personal experience as a descendent of the Gens Du Colour. The Hatian Revolution and it's intendant horrors and the story of the Haitian people is deeply personal to me as a child of the Caribbean. These are dark, dark, stories full of anguish and pain. Allende is my all time favorite writer... I've read everything she's written and I could find with a deep appreciation for her facile, deft, lyrical and skilled writing. Her choice to pursue this character's tale--channelling it in the way only artists understand--and bringing this human story out into the light, the good, the bad and the ugly without the kind of romance so many others have handled the same kind of material (like in Anne Rice's Feast of The Saints) is remarkable and deeply appreciated by me. The resonance of the story cannot be mitigated for me, and in reading it I heard echoes of my own family's history come back to me. It's not a story that can make yo feel 'good' as it is a story about women of colour, those women of the Gens Du Colour who are my ancestors had to live through. This is, like Allende says in refrain, the way it was.
I appreciate your perspective, and definitely understand that we read from where we have been in life. Allende just doesn't provide the kind of "escapism" I look for when I read a novel. She does use language beautifully and vividly, and I respect her as an artist. Thank you for sharing your perspective!
Although I understand your need for "escapism", I have to comment here as well. Good literature is not written for readers to escape, but to send a message, to teach and maybe to make us better humans. Pretty and nice are not necessarily hand in hand with this.
That depends... there are as many reasons to read as there are readers, and one reason is not less valid than another. Escapism is as good a reason to read as self-betterment.
I'd also just like to toss out there that most "great" literature contains at least an element of escapism. Shakespeare's work never would have survived, and may never have been aired in the first place, if he didn't have a great many bawdy and ludicrous moments in with his very astute observations of human nature. The same could be said of Dickens, Twain, and many others. It amazes me how many people read Austen just for the romance-- when her books are much more about manners and 19th century gentry life than modern "romance."Also, having read plenty of amateur Christian writing, I can tell you for certain that the mere fact that a work is written for the purpose of teaching and attempting to make people better than they are-- in no way promises good literature. Often it comes off as didactic, heavy-handed, and annoying.
Just chiming in as a woman of color and haitian ancestry to back up the original reviewers statement - escapism is a perfectly valid motive in reading esp when the plot/ characters don't have a link your w your own circumstances - and that it's fine to want more levity in a novel at times. I totally agree that the book is on the greyer side ; I love Allende but I always take breaks when reading her work bc she definitely leaves me feeling morose, albeit beautifully so. And that's not always what I want from a book.
Masamune - your Christian fiction example had me laughing because it's so true. And Kim, you're right. I just need to take breaks while I read Allende. I don't think escapism has to equal levity at all though. If I'm so engrossed in a novel that I forget I'm sitting in my living room in Central Texas, and am actually IN the story, that's good escapism. But I do demand of the books I love that they provide a glimmer of hope -- some kind of spark -- even in the thick of their bad times. As people that is what we look for in life. And THAT to me is the realest kind of realism there is.
As someone once told me about something negative I'd just heard: "it may be the truth but it's not the WHOLE truth."
Jude wrote: "But is that supposed to be the sole criterion by which to review a work?"Is what supposed to be the sole criterion for reviewing a book? If you mean the reader's (in this case, my) enjoyment of it then I would say it's definitely the most IMPORTANT criterion. If a reader doesn't, above all else, enjoy a work of fiction then all its other merits kind of fall by the wayside. At least for that particular reader.
