Customer Reviews

Portrait in Sepia: A Novel

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read this book at an extremely leisurely pace: a few pages at a time, over the course of weeks. Strangely enough, Allende's novel seems perfect for this kind of catch-as-catch-can type of reading. It doesn't have the narrative drive of a book you can't put down, but it has the characters and history to keep you returning.

In many ways, this novel is less of a story than a portrait of characters that have largely appeared elsewhere in her fiction, although it's not necessary to have read these other books. The emphasis is unequivocably on the del Valles, with Paulina del Valle the most memorable. Paulina is the glue that holds everything together. Other characters, equally well drawn, appear strongly in some sections, then vanish into the background, thus shifting the attention back to Paulina. Not surprisingly, the most elusive character is the narrator, Aurora, who is also the photographer, both literally and metaphorically. The story is filtered through her lens - her experience, perceptions, and ideas.

The "sepia" part of the title refers to the historical/nostalgic atmosphere of the novel. Allende takes her characters through the San Francisco of Gold Rush times and through turbulent times in Chile during war and the rise of women's rights. Here, everything is a memory.

The plot? The novel traces Aurora del Valle's life, from the times leading up to her conception to the moment when, as an adult, she is given back the crucial memory that has subconsciously defined her. You won't find a single driving conflict here; even Aurora's perplexity about her mysterious dream surfaces only now and then. Instead, you will find a family album, complete with the syphilitic uncle, the feminist aunt who is always pregnant, the gluttonous and proud matriarch, and the butler rumored to be a nobleman who scandalously marries into the family.

Allende writes with confidence and skill, sometimes overdoing the prose but quickly righting herself. Her circuitous approach to this story - attacking different moments and events from various directions, shifting in and out of times, mixing bits of stories from several characters - makes this novel one to sit with for a while. Fans of her early fiction will be disappointed about the lack of magic realism, but her hand with detail and characterization remains as steady as always.

I recommend this novel for Allende fans and readers of character-driven fiction. Readers who expect a driving narrative, however, will find this work lacking.

I just finished reading this book, and all I can say is "WOW!" This is the first book of Isabel Allende's that I have read, and I am on my way to go read the rest of them! When I first began this book, I was not aware that Portrait in Sepia was the sequel to Daughter of Fortune; I did not find out that fact until I was already about 50 pages into it. However, by that time, I was so engrossed in this book that I didn't care that I was accidentally reading a sequel first! Nor was I lost at all because this beautifully written books fills you in on the past, or on whatever happened in Daughter of Fortune.

Given that this book was translated from another language, I expected it to be dry and without detail. I was very wrong!! This book is full of detail, but not of the boring, unnecessary kind. It is pretty easy to follow, and I read it quickly. This book kept me interested from the first page to the last, and already I want to read it again!

Isabel Allende is a talented and gifted weaver of beautifully crafted stories. Portrait in Sepia takes place after her previos novel, Daughter of Fortune, although it is not a true sequel. Reading Daughter of Fortune is a wonderful experience but not necessary in order to follow this novel. This is a brilliant story of a young girl's past as she discovers the missing pieces to who she is. She discovers her heritage, her true history and learns to understand that the mistakes and choices that people make are usually done for love or because of love. The characters are vivid and alive. The women cover a wide spectrum, but many are strong, independent and loving women, with a clear picture of who they are and how they wish to live and knowledge of their own faults. The men are also amazing characters, from the strong to the weak, all with real human flaws and strengths, that make them very real. Portrait in Sepia is a study of the human soul, always present, always visible for those who truly take the time to look.

What happened in that museum when Eliza Sommers viewed the supposed head of Joaquin Murieta? And what about the parents of Clara the Clairvoyant, what is their story? Portrait in Sepia answers both these questions and more. It also introduces us to Aurora del Valle, the granddaughter of Paulina del Valle and also Eliza Sommers. The story is told in a fashion similar to Eva Luna, with childhood memories and later discoveries forming most of its basis. I absolutely loved Daughter of Fortune and have been eagerly awaiting the sequel for years. Anyone who cannot get enough of Isabel Allende and her magical realism style of story telling will love this book. As for claims that it is not as good as the original, I would say so only in the aspect that I think I like the character of Eliza Sommers more than that of her granddaughter. However, this is a powerful book and I am grateful to the author for writing it.

When I finished reading 'Daughter of Fortune' I had a profound sense of letdown: the exhilarating trip through the unique character's fascinating lives was over, yet there were no resolutions to the major conflicts of the novel. I felt that the narrative had stopped abruptly, rather than concluded in any satisfactory way. I wondered if Allende had been under some sort of pressure to finish this novel and get it to publication. I awaited the publication of 'Portrait in Sepia' eagerly,I was still enamored and involved with the characters in 'Daughter of Fortune', even though 'Portrait in Sepia' is not exactly a sequel, jumping forward the backward in time, I was eager for some answers about what exactly had happened to Tao Chien, Eliza, Paulina and Severo. Finishing 'Portrait in Sepia' left me with a familiar sense of let down; though I devoured it, reading from cover to cover, bouncing back and forth from Chile to San Francisco, I finished unsatisfied. I have resolved to re-read 'House of the Spirits' for more details of the de Valle family history. My frustration at the lack of conventional plotting does nothing to dim my enthusiasm for Allende's writing, which is, as always, lyrical and magical. I am amazed that the poetry and the flow of her language survives translation time and again. As long as she continues to invent characters this vivid and three dimensional and as long as her language lilts and soars in this fashion, I will continue reading her happily. However, I hope that in future writing she might confine herself to a smaller canvas, a story that can be told whole in a single novel.

Maybe it's me, but I had a hard time getting "into" this book. It didn't keep me very interested, but I read on to see if it would get better & how it would end. I read Daughter of Fortune and it was much of the same way for me, but it picked up after the first 75 pages. I thought this would be the same way, but really it picked up in the middle, after 150 pages! It was a neat story to tell, but it could have been told faster, and therefore made the book more engrossing.

I really liked the way the words flowed together to make a visual picture of what the author was describing. Another thing I liked was that the imagination the author used to create her characters. These characters were unique and stood out from the norm. The different cultures added an exotic flare. With the grandfather being Chinese, practising herbs, energy work and the beliefs of Karma and reincarnation. The two grandmothers also had individual personalities one being extravagantly rich and an entreprenur. The other a pastry maker with a big eye for adventure. This was not your run of the mill romance novel. Each character seemed to have something special about them. The story is written by Aurora the grandchild of Chilian, Spanish, Chinese and American blood. She herself is interested in photography and writing. It makes you wonder if this story is borrowed from the authors own history. This is a story of how her life unfolds with all her relatives taking a major part in the telling. There are episodes of war, romance, intrigue and wealth all intertwined with alot of new age sentiments thrown in. It is pretty obvious the writer knows about intuition and uses Aurora to model these principles. The last page really got me I loved the way how she used the title to make a rich point at the end of her narrative, Aurora's narrative. This was a splendid story and I recommend it to men and women, but it might be more of a woman's book, because it is about a woman. Definately a winner!

...

Isabel Allende writes wonderful books that focus on women and their world without being in the slightest bit feminist. "Portrait in Sepia," one of Allende's finest works and my favorite, tells the story of Aurora del Valle, the daughter of a half-Chinese mother and a wealthy Chilean father. Although Aurora's selfish and self-indulgent father denied her existence, her mother did find true love, and a very brief marriage (she died in childbirth) with Aurora's father's cousin, Severo del Valle.

After her birth in San Francisco's Chinatown, Aurora was raised by her mother's parents until the death of her sweet and angelic grandfather, Tao Chi'en. Then her wealthy (and somewhat arrogant), "paternal" grandmother, Paulina del Valle steps in. (It is interesting to note that Aurora's maternal grandmother, Eliza Sommers, was the protagonist of a previous book by Allende, "Daughter of Fortune.")

Although the primary focus of this book is on Aurora, it is the widowed Paulina who is the most engaging and, in my opinion, the most lovable, character Allende has ever created. Paulina is certainly a character with a strong will and she usually accomplishes what she sets out to do.

After her husband's death, Paulina, seeing no reason to remain in San Francisco, packs up and moves her entire family back to Chile, Aurora included. She also marries her very own butler and, when back in Chile, she manages to pass him off as an impoverished British lord. Thus, rather then being ridiculed, Paulina becomes the object of envy instead. Williams (the butler), Aurora later tells us, spoke exactly four words of Spanish and so was, of necessity, rather silent and taciturn in Spanish-speaking Chile. His silence, however, was revered by the locals who saw him as wise and full of both pride and mystery.

Although it may not be apparent at first, Aurora and Paulina are a lot alike. They are both independent women who become trapped in very traditional, but loveless, marriages. Both women rebel in the sense that they seek to transcend their circumstances, something 19th century women, in San Francisco or in Chile, usually didn't do. Paulina becomes a shrewd businesswoman, while Aurora becomes a photographer. Both women, however, remain true to their cultural heritage and to Chile. Aurora seeks, through her art, to capture "the multifaceted and tormented face of Chile" on film. And, at the age of thirty, Aurora wants and needs to recapture the first five years of her life, the five years she spent in San Francisco with her maternal grandparents.

Part of the charm of this book is Allende's very skillful rendering of period detail. She makes both 19th century San Francisco and 19th Chile come alive. Although this isn't a historical or a political novel, (nor is it a feminist one), Allende does align her protagonists with the feminine side of political issues. This is not, however, a book that sacrifices story to social commentary. Allende is far too good a storyteller to let that happen and she possesses far too much restraint. Despite that restraint, this book is a sumptuous feast of a romance...high-spirited, lyrical, sensitive, melancholy, rapturous and exuberant. Don't let that put you off..."Portrait in Sepia" is definitely literature, not genre fiction.

I realize that Allende has been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I believe that comparisons between these two great Latin American authors are supremely unfair. Each is wonderful is his or her own way. And Allende has come a long way from magic realism and "The House of the Spirits." While Garcia Marquez writes of characters in the subtropical jungles and rainforests of Colombia, Allende's characters are firmly rooted in Chile...a country that is more temperate and more unforgiving. And Allende writes more like a woman than a man; she is more of a romantic, more lyrical in her prose style. She lets us share in the emotional life of her characters more than does Garcia Marquez. They are different writers with different styles, and each one contributes something to his or her work that is lasting and beautiful.

Much of this book is "told" rather than "shown," i.e., dramatized in scenes. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been a huge mistake and could have resulted in a book that was dry and boring and without emotional depth. In the hands of a writer as skilled as Allende, however, this device creates a seamless fluidity that only makes the book grow lovlier and lovlier. And we do become involved with the characters, there can be no doubt about that, for they are anything and everything but ordinary.

I don't understand why so many readers didn't care for this book. Perhaps they were looking for something closer to the style of Garcia Marquez. Perhaps they were put off by the "memoir" style of the book and the fact that so much of it is told rather than shown. In my opinion, Allende wanted to keep some distance between the reader and some of the book's more tumultuous events lest the delicacy of the story be disturbed.

I loved the watercolor delicacy of this book and I think one has only to look at the epilogue to recognize that delicacy was part and parcel of this story. As Aurora, herself, says, "I live among duffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone for telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia."

I loved "Portrait in Sepia." I wish I could find more books out there like it.

The story told by Aurora del Valle in Isabel Allende's "Portrait in Sepia" is profoundly engrossing, captivating the reader in a net of unusual events among remarkable, original characters.

"Portrait in Sepia" reconstructs the past of Aurora, the protagonist of "The Daughter of Fortune", a very successful earlier novel by Allende, but it does not mean it is a mere sequel. This novel stands on its own and can be read separately as a whole. It is deeply rooted inn the South American tradition of convoluted, multigenerational family sagas. There are all the characteristic elements: the ancestral characters are eccentric, colorful and each of them has a life worth of a full novel, their labirynthine adventures form a network of separate, but intersecting stories; the circumstances of birth of the main protagonist, the narrator - Aurora, are dramatic and romantic at the same time ; the background historical events in the described period (the break of 19th and 20th centuries) are at least as full of suspense and revealing the human nature, as the personal adventures of the characters.

Aurora del Valle, at thirty, is finally able to reconstruct her past. The families involved on the maternal and paternal side could not be more different. Aurora's paternal grandparents, Paulina del Valle and Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, are a wealthy couple from Chile, living in San Francisco, sophisticated and successful in business. Paulina is a typical matriarch, who rules the family, has a very strong personality, moods which affect everyone around her, and particular tastes and whims, one of which are the Chilean pastries, which lead her often to the small store in San Francisco's Chinatown. The owner of the store is Eliza Sommers, Aurora's maternal grandmother, who run in pursuit of an unfaithful lover from Chile to California, where she found real love in the arms of a Chinese doctor, Tao Chi'en. They are blessed with two children, Lucky and Lynn, but cursed by the absolute beauty and naivety of their daughter. Lynn gives them Aurora, and they take care of the child until Tao's death when Aurora is five; from then on she lives with Paulina and goes back to Chile, her life is changed and she almost forgets the tragedy from Chinatown, which appears only in her nightmares and she is able to consciously remember it only many years later.

The story is not limited to the grandparents; Aurora's uncle Severo and his wife, Nivea, are also richly described, strong characters who play important roles in her life. There are many secondary personas whose attributes are unusual, even if merely for the anegdotical purpose. Their fates are inseparably connected with the historical events occurring in their lifetime: the Chinese immigration and the American attitude towards them, their struggle and assimilation; the dictatorship and wars in Chile; finally, the feminist movement, or the souffrage, which is especially important in this novel, as it is discussed, and at the same time accepted and contested by showing the contrast between Nivea, a woman who argues the most for it, has the mind open wide, firm beliefs and goals which she achieves, but she is the one who leads the very traditional life in comparison to Paulina and Eliza, who, a generation older, fulfill their dreams as freely as the women of our times, but do not give a thought to feminism.

The story goes past Aurora's birth and childhood and in the last part of the book concentrates on Aurora herself, her passion for photography, her marriage and loves.

My favorite male characters are Severo and Tao Chi'en, probably because of their wisdom and good characters, which do not diminish their masculinity and charm, natural, although not actively pursued (as opposed to the pathetic Matias Rodriguez de Santa Cruz).

The main difference I see between Allende and other South American writers is that her prose is soaked with femininity, very sensual, its magic comes from the belief in intuition, supported by wisdom and strength. The women in "Portrait in Sepia" are equally colorful and varied characters as men, and all the characters are very human, with their vices and strong points, nobody is a total villain or saint. The importance of romance and love which can be destructive or move the mountains, which can be misplaced or very well chosen, is central to this novel, as well as the passion for things other than love, which is essential to the well-being and internal equilibrium and the only thing besides love which can bring happiness and sense of fulfillment.

I meant to tackle Allende's prose for a long time, and this is the first novel of hers, that I finally read - and definitely not the last one.

I really enjoyed "Daughter of Fortune" and looked forward to reading this 2001 sequel. I wasn't disappointed. Ms. Allende is a fine storyteller. It must have been difficult for her to weave the important elements of the two books together but it all fell together flawlessly. Again, I was swept into the story, which starts out in San Francisco and moves back to Chile, where the saga or these characters first began. The historical detail and the setting of time and place fascinated me. And so did the development of the characters who sprung to life from the pages.

There's Aurora del Valle, the granddaughter of two very powerful women. One is the heroine of the prior book, a woman who followed one love to California but found another. And the other is the wealthy Paulina del Valle, a large woman whose business sense created a fortune for her family. Both are very different and both love their granddaughter, who gradually learns the depth of their love as well as the family secrets.

There's tragedy in this book as well as romance. There's war and peace. And there are lots of contrasts between the places that are so well drawn that I felt I was actually living there. There's also a resolution as we look forward to the future of the characters in 20th century. Hopefully, the author will continue the story. Recommended.