What Are You Reading / Reviews - July thru Dec 2021

[James]

Isabel Allende, La suma de las dias [2007] 365 pages [in Spanish]

An autobiography, beginning with the death of her daughter, Paula, in 1993, and continuing to the date it was written in 2007. It is largely the story of her extended family, or "tribe" as she calls it. Their lives resemble a soap opera, with quarrels and divorces, love affairs, births and deaths, and ghostly spirits. In addition to her second husband Willie, there is her grown son Nico, his ex-wife Celia who left him for Willie's son Jason's fiancée Sally, his second wife Lori, and his three children Alejandro, Andrea and Nicole, Willie's daughter Jennifer and her orphaned daughter Sabrina who is adopted by a couple of lesbian Buddist nuns, a young Greek widow, Juliette (who offers to be a surrogate for Lori and Nico) and her two sons, Aristotle and Achilles, a friend Tabra who occasionally lives with them and her on-and-off Comanche boyfriend named Lagarto Emplumado (Feathered Lizard) who is trying to recover the crown of Montezuma and return it to the Aztecs, and various other colorful characters.

Along the way, she mentions the books she is writing. While all her novels I have or have checked out from the library are subsequent to this book, and I was planning to stop with them, I discovered here that Hija de la fortuna and Retrato en sepia were written as "prequels" to La casa de los espíritus, so I will want to read those eventually, and that El Zorro was not about a fox but about the television character which was one of my favorites when I was a child, so I may want to find that and add it to my ever-growing TBR list as well.

[James]

Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia [2020] 356 pages [Kindle]

Magdalena, the book chosen to represent Colombia for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, is not a literary work by a Colombian as I was hoping to read but a book about Colombia by a North American naturalist, Wade Davis. (The group did the same thing with Bolivia, reading a Spanish journalist about the country.) Having read his earlier book about the Amazon basin, One River, I knew what to expect: short anecdotes about history, anthropology, botany and zoology, literature, music, art and current events, tied together by the author's travels along the river. The book is a very subjective account; a main theme is ecology and the need for conservation and restoration of the river and the lands along its banks, which is very good, but when he gets into the other themes, as interesting as his narratives are, I am a bit more skeptical. In particular, he seems to have come to his political conclusions in advance and then looked for informants who would reinforce what he already believed -- a sort of semi-Christian spiritualist pacifism.

The author very powerfully presents the tragedy of the years of violence and its effects on both the population and the environment, but he just takes the simplistic position that "violence is bad", setting the drug lords, the right-wing paramilitaries and the various leftist guerilla groups all equal. He gives no idea of the politics of the various guerilla movements, which are all essentially lumped together with the FARC and attributed to quarrels over drug money, and doesn't address the question of how the peasants and workers could change things democratically in a country where the economy and government are completely dominated by a conservative oligarchy linked to the United States and the multinational corporations. If Allende couldn't do it peacefully in Chile, there was even less chance in Colombia. Basically, he just praises people who were apolitical and only concerned with their own lives and earning a living, and considers any sort of politics as naive or evil -- except of course for environmental activism.

He gives a cautiously optimistic account of the peace process in the text, but admits -- hidden in the acknowledgements and other "back matter" at the end, which most people never read -- that in fact there is still a high level of political violence by the right-wing paramilitaries and that the amnesty has been applied very unequally, with virtual immunity for the right wing but persecution of the former guerillas, which is pushing some factions back into armed activity. He also suggests in the text that there are improvements in conservation, while admitting in the back matter that things are actually getting worse.

There is much interesting information in this book, but I would hesitate to take it all as factual.

[Melissa]

Mistletoe Magic by Fern Michaels
6 ★

A delightful collection of Christmas stories and love at first sight moments. All the stories are connected by characters in the other stories and I enjoyed that. It kept the story rolling and the reader doesn't have to remember a whole new set of characters.