Of Love and Shadows

Of Love and Shadows written by the brilliant modern-day Scheherazade that is Isabel Allende (ah-YEN-day) was not as wonderful as I wanted it to be, but it turned out to be just as spellbinding as I would expect of her. Let me begin...

I was told by an history professor who I admired that his favorite author was Allende. This alone made her writings seem intimidating, but I feared not and read The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna; three of the most brilliantly written books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. They are magical and desperate and violent and erotic. She continues Latin America's tradition of magical realism and wields her pen with precision, turning out stories that are absolutely fantastic, dreamlike, and very real. It isn't enough to say Allende is my favorite author, I adore her books; she dashes any goals of authorship I may have because I simply am not good enough. Of Love and Shadows wasn't what I expected because in it Allende cast off the gauzy shroud of magical realism in favor of a brutal and honest look at human suffering. I was looking for an adventurous fairy tale and got a heavy dose of why living in the United States with the Bill of Rights is such a treasure.

That having been said, Of Love and Shadows is one of Allende's shorter novels, relating a story of desperate love and a psyche awakened to the horrors of living under a military dictatorship in Latin America (read: Chile in the 1970s following the coup that ousted Allende's uncle, socialist president Salvador Allende). Irene Beltrán is the protagonist and Francisco Leal is there too. He's lovely. He rides a motorcycle and has long hair and is called Francisco. Mmmm...

Sorry. So there is a mine and there are corpses and lovemaking and desaparecidos. Allende manages to pull the reader into a story of covert grave digging, people being "disappeared," and the families they leave behind, all in a way that makes it believable. This is an important element because while the story in the book may not be fact, it nonetheless happened to thousands of people, and thousands of families, and continues to happen all over the world, today, right now, as you're reading this. This is the kind of thing we never studied in high school in the US because there wasn't enough time, or it didn't relate to the US, or we all partook in an outrageously racist history curriculum, or because the CIA doesn't want us to know (you decide, get back to me). I am thankful to a Spanish teacher in high school who wove language, culture, and history together in a way that gave me an understanding of the world as a global place and kept me from feeling academically confined (te agradezco Sra. Laporta).

If you are looking to get to know Allende and her books, don't start with this one, but do get around to reading it. Then learn more about Oscar Romero, Charles Harmon, the CIA, and Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. It will fill in some gaps and teach you another meaning of the word freedom.