Customer Reviews

Infinite Plan

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I am lukewarm to Allende. Personally I enjoyed this book and was never bored or frustrated, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for others.

You know what it's like reading Isabel Allende? I'll tell you:

Suppose somebody ordered you to write a novel and lay it in some historical setting: imperial Russia, the antebellum South, northern England in the 1800's -- whatever.

And suppose there was an additional condition: that you can't do any research about that time or place. That you can't, while you're writing, read anything about your setting that would help to make your novel more convincing and lifelike.

Well, you'd still be able to write the book. But it wouldn't be very convincing, because you'd be reduced to rehashing stereotypes and common ideas of the time and period that you've heard. Kinda like me writing about imperial Russia and talking about the freezing cold, the poor people on the streets, the vast sky of Mother Russia, etc. It's all true, in a way; yet it's all fake: I haven't actually been there and it will show through.

Now granted, you might be able to craft a decent novel, especially if have, as does Allende, solid insights about the human heart and a sense of the wonderful pageant that is life. But you're book's never gonna be a classic because it's basically a passable story grafted onto phoniness.

And lo that is what is happening with this book.

This book has several settings: roaming around the American west during the Great Depression, a Hispanic barrio near L.A. in the fifties, and the radical campus of U.C. Berkeley in the 60's.

The problem was, Allende was never in any of these places -- and it shows. Her characterization is passable. Her plot -- what there is of it -- will do. But something definitely seems wrong because Allende was never in the places she describes at the time she describes them, so you get the feeling she's not doing a job any better than you or I could do if we sat down to think about it for a few moments.

This sense of strain runs through more than a few of Allende's works. In my judgment only "Paula" and "House of Spirits" escape it, because they are set in places that she definitely was.

Meanwhile, this book, largely about Vietnam (!) and Berkeley (!) in the 60s, reads like it was written by a woman who spent those years thousands of miles away, in Chile, in fact. And so it was. It's basically surmise as literature.

The thing that got me into this book was somebody having told me it was her "favorite book ever!" That's usually enough to get me to read something, but I should have been a bit suspicious since there's not, at least as of my writing, a Wikipedia page for it. I've since concluded that chick needs to read more books.

I read this masterpiece over 10 years ago and it remains one of the best novels that I have ever read. I have been a fan of the author ever since. If you need something to read over a long weekend, or during the Christmas holiday, pick up a copy.