A Long Petal Of The Sea Review
In the back of my copy of A Long Petal Of The Sea there is an interview between the book’s author, Isabel Allende, and another popular author at the moment, Madeline Miller. This interview was much more interesting than I’d expected, mainly because Allende’s description of her writing process made it clear to me that she is a literary genius.
And what I mean by genius is not that she is some untouchable perfect master of fiction, but more that her intuition for story craft is so strong and unique that even the somewhat imperfect execution of her writing (that I will get into) does not hold her stories back from making their full emotional impact.
As I just finished A Long Petal Of The Sea an hour ago, pummeled by the poignant happy-sadness of the narrative, I was struck by how well the full picture comes together, even when some individual parts of it feel messy or unpolished. I had a similar reaction to her first and most well-known novel The House Of Spirits (I discussed in this post), but I find that with A Long Petal, both its strengths and its flaws are more exaggerated.
In A Long Petal, we get to see almost every one of the huge cast of characters in three dimensions, and the very few that remain flat are still totally believable as real people, in that their flatness is representative of narrow-minded people in the real world.
More than that, the characters’ arcs intertwine with each other in ways that are unpredictable, and yet feel totally natural. This book kept on surprising me, even as it dropped hints along the way. This is a rarity in popular modern writing, so often twists and surprises are entirely predictable, or are spoiled beforehand, or happen in such a cheap and convenient way that they aren’t really unpredictable so much as a random subversion of assumptions.
Not so with this book (at least in my case), where each time I was surprised by something, I found there was a trail of foreshadowing that led to it, but which was subtle enough I couldn’t have guessed where it was going.
This novel also showcases Allende’s mastery over the South American literary magic of circular time. Any given scene might shift forward or backward a full generation, sometimes both forward and backward at the same time, while the overall narrative maintains its steady forward momentum. Themes and formative events come up cyclically, and the end is a mirror of the beginning.
This is a really, like a genuinely super hard thing to do as an author, and Allende seems to do it with ease—her quick and dirty prose gives the impression that her typing can’t keep up with her imagination.
The higher-dimensional logic of her narratives became even more impressive to me after reading her interview, where she claimed that most of her inspiration and background information comes from real people’s experiences, and that she usually starts writing a story without really knowing why or where she’s going with it.
This gives her works the elegant complexity that can only come from true inspiration, from an uncanny intuition that even she herself doesn’t seem to fully understand. And like I said, the genius of her storytelling is only really clear because of the flaws in her prose writing, which is another quite unusual aspect of her authorhood.
Disclaimer: because I have only read the English translations of her works, I cannot accurately assess Allende’s prose writing, as any or all of my criticisms could be due to weaknesses in the translation, or simply to do untranslatability (i.e. Chilean Spanish is chalk full of idioms, many of which are hilarious in their cultural context but don’t make sense when directly translated and which don’t have close analogs in English). So, when I criticize the prose in A Long Petal, just know that those faults may not necessarily be the responsibility of Allende herself.
Alright let me explain what I mean by flaws. In A Long Petal Of The Sea, and to some extent in The House Of Spirits, I found the prose to be kind of messy. For one thing she uses a lot of idioms, which in the English translations occasionally come across as cliched, though their original Chilean Spanish meanings may not be cliche, or may be clever in ways that aren’t clear in the translated version.
But beyond the idioms there are some other issues too. At times the prose is especially dry, occasionally not even giving us a clear sense of place, but at other times it can be especially flowery, sometimes in moments where it seems a bit superfluous.
That’s not to say there aren’t some really beautiful standout lines—there are lots of them actually—but the overall writing style is more on the basic side. That’s not necessarily a flaw, it’s just a choice by the author, but as a generally prose-first reader it’s something I definitely notice.
Beyond that, it sometimes felt to me like paragraphs were out of order, like the flow of certain scenes was kind of jumbled—I feel like this happened most with the densest scenes, the ones that packed huge time-frames into a few passages.
Because of these issues, I found myself slightly frustrated with individual scenes, particularly in the middle of the book where the story slows down for a few chapters. The somewhat choppy prose made it feel like this part of the story was meandering.
In isolation, some of those scenes feel like they fit more neatly in a light pop-drama, an average pulpy beach read. But I’m happy to report that despite my nit-pickings of the prose, by the end every piece was justified, every scene is important to the arc of the narrative. The frustration in the middle was rewarded with great satisfaction by the end.
What’s remarkable about that is, as I mentioned before, it gives me the impression that Allende’s narrative intuition is so strong that her prose can’t keep up. She shows excellent prose chops in some places, but seems in too much a hurry to tell the story that she can’t hold every sentence to the same standard.
And this makes a lot of sense based on her writing process, because as she stated in her interview, she cranks out a new novel about once every eighteen months.
The fact that she works so fast is one reason I say she’s a genius, because although it means the prose comes out a bit unpolished, I still can’t begin to reckon how she fits the narrative puzzles together in such a short time. I haven’t read enough of her work to know if all her books are like this, but at least with House and Petal the intertwining character arcs are put together with such incredible foresight, it feels like the author can see outside of time.
I just realized that this novel shows Allende’s strengths and weaknesses as being the exact inverse of F. Scott Fitzgerald, best exemplified by his novel Tender Is The Night (as I discussed in this post). Where Fitzgerald had a preternatural gift for prose that exceeded his storytelling, Allende’s preternatural storytelling exceeds her prose (at least in translation).
So, with all that, I highly recommend A Long Petal Of The Sea. In my opinion it’s not perfect, but its imperfections are part of what make it such an engaging experience.
What do you think? Have you read A Long Petal Of The Sea? Do you agree with my praise and/or my criticisms? Does Fitzgerald seem like an odd comparison to bring up? Let me know in the comments, thanks for reading!
Gibbles
