Review: My Name Is Emilia del Valle

 

I was afraid the book had gotten away from her. It had gotten away from me, and I thought irretrievably. It begins slowly like one of those austere Chilean warships she writes about, becomes unwieldy, and when the engine explodes, I was sure we were going to the bottom. It sailed into port like a hand in a silk glove. But let me try to be a little more prosaic. 

The titular Emilia del Valle grows up in San Fransisco during the 1890s, the last gasp of the gold rush. Her mother, an Irish girl, was about to take her vows as a nun when she was seduced by a Chilean aristocrat who abandoned her and her child. She finds shelter and eventual domestic bliss with a  greathearted schoolteacher, but she always harbors a desire for revenge upon her seducer. And she tries to transfer that vengeful desire to her daughter.

Her mother's revenge fantasies fuel Emilia's first forays as a writer, dime novels under an assumed (male) name. That's important to remember: Emilia is a writer. That will be more than her vocation. It will be her salvation.

The story then widens out from a family saga in a dangerous way as Emilia's inevitably pulled into her father's orbit and her fatherland, which is in the middle of a brutal civil war, brutally detailed by Allende. The effect is jarring, as if the author has set off a bomb in the middle of a tea party. The shift seems almost unforgivable.

But just when you're about to be swamped the ship changes tack again. Emilia's reaction to the horrors she has witnessed and undergone is profound, and she undertakes a journey which seems impossibly foolhardy, but it's as much an inward journey as a matter of miles, a journey to the heartland and to her own heart, the heart of a writer.

Confused? I was. And exasperated at times, but in the end I was won over. It's a difficult book, not in its lambent prose, but in its shifting scope. It takes a pro to pull it off. Isabelle Allende is up to the task.

My Name is Emilia del Valle will be available May 6th. It can be pre-ordered now.