Violeta tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, born on a stormy day in 1920 as the Spanish flu reaches the shores of her South American homeland, and dying a century later during the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured as a long letter to her beloved grandson, the novel follows Violeta through the Great Depression, the rise and fall of dictators, the fight for women's rights, passionate and destructive loves, and the upheavals of a continent in constant transformation. Inspired by the life of Allende's own mother.
My Review
Violeta spans a full century, from the Spanish flu to Covid, structured as a long letter from a centenarian woman to her beloved grandson. The premise is elegant and the execution is readable in that particular way Allende is known for: I slipped through the novel almost without noticing, surfacing at the end like after a long, placid swim. The writing is excellent, and Violeta’s life, covering poverty and wealth, passionate and disastrous love affairs, complicated motherhood, political upheaval, and eventual activism, gives the novel a sweep that keeps things moving.
And yet. Something about it kept me at arm’s length.
The emotional impact I expected from a hundred years of a woman’s life never quite arrived. Devastating events are recounted and then moved past with a briskness that occasionally felt like a disservice to both character and reader. This might be a structural consequence of the epistolary format, a woman in her nineties recalling events at considerable remove, but the result is that the bad things happen without landing the way they should. The one exception is Nieves, Violeta’s daughter, whose sections finally allowed genuine feeling to break through.
The characters are unevenly realised too. Miss Taylor and Julián, who appear early, are vivid and memorable. Later arrivals are thinner. And Violeta herself, perhaps inevitably as the narrator of her own story, remains oddly hard to know.
Three and a half stars. I will read more Allende, because the writing is too good not to, but I suspect this is not where she is at her best.