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![]() First edition (Plaza & Janés) | |
Author | Isabel Allende |
---|---|
Original title | Largo pétalo de mar |
Translator | Nick Caistor Amanda Hopkinson |
Language | Spanish |
Genre | Historical fiction |
Publisher | Plaza & Janés |
Publication date | 2019 |
Publication place | Spain |
Published in English | 2020 |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 384 |
ISBN | 978-1-9848-9916-3 (hardback) |
LC Class | PQ8098.1.L54 L36 2019 |
Preceded by | In the Midst of Winter |
Followed by | Violeta |
A Long Petal of the Sea (Spanish : Largo pétalo de mar) is a 2019 novel by Chilean author Isabel Allende. Originally published in Spain by Plaza & Janés, it was first published in the United States by Vintage Espanol. [1] The novel was issued in 2019 in Spanish as Largo pétalo de mar, and was translated into English by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. Told through fictional characters in the context of real historical events, [2] [3] the story takes place partly during the Spanish Civil War and partly in Chile where the protagonists again witness the fight between freedom and repression. [4] A Long Petal of the Sea became the most popular book in Spain between April 2019 and April 2020. [5]
During the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, Victor Dalmau has left his medical studies to help the Republicans against the Fascist forces of General Franco. During the Battle of Teruel his leg gets wounded. Victor's brother, Guillem, is also a Republican soldier, but he dies in the Battle of the Ebro.
Victor seeks the help of his Basque friend, Aitor Ibarra, to send his mother Carme and Guillem's wife, Roser, to France during La Retirada, as the victory of Franco's forces is becoming more and more certain. Carme, believing she will burden her family's future prospects in France, disappears before leaving Spain. Roser is pregnant with Guillem's child, and after finding asylum in France, gives birth to a boy named Marcel, after Guillem and Victor's father.
After many trials, Victor reunites with Roser in France and reveals that Guillem has died. They hear that Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, is going to take a certain number of Spanish refugees to Chile. Desperate to grab the chance, Victor and Roser get married reluctantly to qualify for the journey. They embark on this journey, but migration to the new country is not the end of their problem.
In 1939 businessman Isidro and his wife Laura Del Solar travel from Chile to Liverpool on the MV Reina del Pacifico. Back in Chile their daughter Ofelia, who's engaged to Matías Eyzaguirre, starts an affair with Victor. She gives birth to a baby, but they tell her it was stillborn.
In 1966 Salvador Allende is elected president, but his government is overthrown during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The people who emigrated from Spain to Chile get the feeling that they're in a neverending war.
In 1990 Pinochet steps down as president, so the democracy in Chile can be restored. Victor receives an unexpected visit by Ingrid Schnake, who explains that she's the daughter of him and Ofelia. She wasn't stillborn, but adopted.
Several historical people from Chile or Spain appear as minor characters:
On the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Positive" rating based on 20 reviews: 8 "Rave" reviews, 8 "Positive" reviews, 3 "Mixed" reviews, and 1 "Pan" review. [6] Marcela Davison Avilés of NPR admires the "gifted stories" of Allende, noting that "A Long Petal of the Sea is a love story for these times. But it's not a story beholden to any era. Its call is immutable, like Neruda's hope". [7] The Observer praises the skill with which Allende tells a story of "displacement", "a theme sharpened by her own life story". [2] In her review for The New York Times , Paula McLain highlights the themes of this novel: "there is the sense that every human life is an odyssey, and that how and where we connect creates the fabric of our existence: the source of our humanity". [8] Kirkus Reviews praises Allende's storytelling skill: "Allende tends to describe emotions and events rather than delve into them, and she paints the historical backdrop in very broad strokes, but she is an engaging storyteller". [9]
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a socialist committed to democracy, he has been described as the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America.
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Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was a Chilean teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter and Communist political activist. He developed Chilean theater by directing a broad array of works, ranging from locally produced plays to world classics, as well as the experimental work of playwrights such as Ann Jellicoe. He also played a pivotal role among neo-folkloric musicians who established the Nueva canción chilena movement. This led to an uprising of new sounds in popular music during the administration of President Salvador Allende.
Isabel Angelica Allende Llona is a Chilean-American writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the magical realism genre, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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María Isabel Allende Bussi is a Chilean politician and the youngest daughter of former Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens.
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of Latin America. This article is only about Latin American literature from countries where Spanish is the native/official language. Even though these 18 countries share a language, each one has its unique literary traditions although they often overlap with those of other countries. Here only the most general literary trends are discussed. Latin American literature rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is often associated solely with this style, with the 20th century literary movement known as Latin American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel García Márquez. Latin American literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries.
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
SS Winnipeg was a French steamer notable for arriving at Valparaíso, Chile, on 3 September 1939, with 2,200 Spanish immigrants aboard. The refugees were fleeing Spain after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The Chilean President Pedro Aguirre Cerda had named the poet Pablo Neruda Special Consul in Paris for Immigration, and he was charged with what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken": shipping the Spanish refugees, who had been housed by the French government in internment camps, to Chile.
In Chile, the National Prize for Literature(Premio Nacional de Literatura) was created by Law No. 7,368 during the presidency of Juan Antonio Ríos on 8 November 1942. It consists of a lump-sum monetary prize and a lifetime monthly stipend. It was originally awarded every year until the amendments introduced by Law No. 17,595 of 1972, when it became biennial. It's regarded as one of the National Prizes in their homeland.
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Chilean literature refers to all written or literary work produced in Chile or by Chilean writers. The literature of Chile is usually written in Spanish. Chile has a rich literary tradition and has been home to two Nobel prize winners, the poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. It has also seen three winners of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, considered one of the most important Spanish language literature prizes: the novelist, journalist and diplomat Jorge Edwards (1998), and the poets Gonzalo Rojas (2003) and Nicanor Parra (2011).
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