by Claire Chambers
The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende published her twenty-first Spanish-language novel Violeta in 2022, with an English translation by Frances Riddle appearing the same year. This historical novel is affecting and witty, as Allende paints a vivid picture of rural and urban communities in an unnamed country which clearly recalls Chile. Riddle’s translation is clean and unfussy, making the book an easy read and seemingly conveying the original’s musicality. At times the text’s straightforward Bildungsroman path and revolving door of characters can make the narrative feel superficial. Although the novel occasionally suffers from a hurried pace, it compensates with original, unsentimental observations about social issues from an insider’s perspective.
Within Latin American and decolonial literary studies, opinions about Allende are mixed, influenced in part by prevailing elitism and misogyny. Her 1982 novel La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) is widely considered Allende’s magnum opus. Even so, aspersions were soon made that the text was derivative of the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Defenders argued she was engaging in homage, parody, and valid intertextuality in this magical realist work. Some critics dismiss her work as ‘airport lit’ or middlebrow fiction, lambasting its love stories and the author’s perceived recycling of her own and others’ ideas. She has also been depicted as ‘suspiciously bourgeois’ when compared to more overtly political writers. However, many if not most onlookers regard her as a talented and socially committed feminist writer.
Despite its flaws, Violeta is an enlightening read that aligns with my current teaching and book project Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Decoronial Writing. Although I focus solely on public health crises, the reality is that they are fused together with other disasters. That is what this novel reveals quite brilliantly.
Violeta Del Valle, narrating the novel in the first person, lives through a tumultuous century bracketed by pandemics and scarred by other cataclysms. The story unfolds within the framework of the so-called Spanish Flu and the Covid-19 pandemic. Violeta is born in 1920 as influenza begins its rampage through her nation. The novel ends as she is about to die a hundred years later, while the novel coronavirus is unleashing its terrors and uncertainties on the world. In between, readers witness the fall of governments; state and domestic violence; a destructive earthquake; deep-rooted poverty; drug and alcohol addiction; as well as various types of discrimination. Notwithstanding her galloping pace and sometimes flimsy characterization, Allende sheds light on the multifaceted impacts of pandemics and other catastrophes on individuals and societies.
Structured in four parts straddling the decades – Exile (1920–1940), Passion (1940–1960), Absence (1960–1983), and Birth (1983–2020) – Violeta unfurls the saga of the titular heroine’s life via a long letter the protagonist writes to her beloved grandson Camilo. Through the epistolary mode, Allende reveals personal triumphs and tribulations that interbraid with pivotal historical events. Violeta’s life is immediately cast in the harsh glare of her times, from her wealthy business family’s downfall during the Great Depression to their forced relocation to a modest countryside dwelling. The rural setting marks the beginning of Violeta’s transition from innocence to maturity, as she contends with love and loss against the backdrop of socio-political upheaval.
The period Allende’s novel covers has been entangled in interwoven crises, with new emergencies regularly emerging. From various quarters, renewed calls for justice respond to the need to combat diseases, colonialism, an encroaching authoritarianism, far-right populism, racism, and – ultimately – the inequalities exacerbated by Covid. Recognizing the interconnected nature of such crises is crucial, as it paves the way for cohesive action.
In her 2020 book Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, Pallavi Rastogi looks at pandemics in the form of the surge in HIV cases which swept across southern Africa in the early 2000s. However, Rastogi is not satisfied with only scrutinizing medical crises, turning a wide-angled lens on other types of ‘postcolonial disaster’ too. For example, the American academic evaluates literary representations of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the 2008 economic crash, and the ongoing refugee crisis.
Unconscious parallels with Rastogi’s astute approach are evident in Violeta. To better understand the connection between the novel and Rastogi’s themes, I now consider specific instances in the narrative where Allende addresses (post)colonial disasters. Just as the First World War and the influenza pandemic collided in the second decade of the twentieth century, so too do we find an intersectionality of disaster in more recent history. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, born out of African American feminist legal scholarship in 1989, acknowledges the complexities of multiple oppressions. Crenshaw rejects viewing identities as monolithic, stressing the tessellation of sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression. Some have criticized her approach for inadvertently entrenching social categories, but intersectionality nonetheless remains a powerful analytical tool. I turn the critical gaze away from identity components towards disasters so as to understand Allende’s depiction of how a range of social injustice and ecological crises converge, amplifying their impact on marginalized communities.
Allende uses the phrase ‘medidas de confinamiento’ (lockdown measures) to describe curfews and repression imposed during Chile’s military regime. Her diction deliberately mirrors the stay-at-home orders experienced during Covid-19. This is reminiscent of arguments made by the Syrian literary critic Feras Alkabani, the American sociologist Dylan Riley, and Leoni Connah, an expert on the Kashmir conflict as regards the global state of emergency declared for Covid. Alkabani’s, Riley’s, and Connah’s essays in their different ways explore the idea that individual experiences like isolation, social distancing, health care, and walking in public during the pandemic are heavily influenced by collective behaviour and societal structures. They highlight how such apparently personal measures in fact parallel the actions and circumstances of the broader community. Alkabani’s ‘Fifty Shades of Lockdown’ reminds Westerners in quarantine of war’s impact in Syria, showing how violence, repression, and economic hardships influence individuals’ coping mechanisms and the struggle for normalcy amidst chaos. In ‘Lockdown Limbo’, Riley examines the paradox of social isolation during the pandemic, emphasizing that such experiences depend heavily on an underlying network of labour and collective participation in societal norms. Finally, Connah argues that in Kashmir, Covid sharpened existing political repression and lockdowns overlaid existing curfews, exacerbating local conflicts and systemic injustices, while serving as cover for political agendas.
Meanwhile, Allende portrays the struggles faced by the ‘mothers of the disappeared’ in Argentina and Chile, also highlighting the manipulation of power by the US in implementing right-wing dictatorships across Latin America, particularly Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile. The fearful atmosphere of tyranny under what is surely General Augusto Pinochet’s quasi-fascist government (1973–1990), which directly impacts Violeta’s son in ‘Part Three: Absence’. As a political dissident, Juan Martín is compelled to flee for Norway, further underscoring the inextricable relationship between political upheaval and other disasters.
Allende’s subjective experiences as the daughter of the deposed socialist and democratic leader Salvador Allende; as someone who has married three times, including in later life; and as a women’s rights activist all inform her fictional material. Feminism, with its slogan ‘The personal is the political’, is a central concern in the novel, particularly pressing in this intensely patriarchal context. Curbs on women’s autonomy – including Chilean women’s shocking inability to divorce or access abortions until the twenty-first century, referenced several times in the novel – appear as another kind of confinement.
Turning from Allende’s personal and political background, let us explore how these elements resonate within the narrative of the novel. Violeta defies the restrictions imposed both by the state and at home. As with the novel’s quadripartite framework, there are four men in her life. Fleeing an unfulfilling starter marriage, she has a passionate yet turbulent affair with Julián Bravo. Julián is a pilot who becomes the reluctant father to her two children, son Juan Martín and daughter Nieves. For a long time, Violeta’s cuckolded first husband refuses to collude with her in getting an annulment, which is the only route open to her since divorce is not an option. As Violeta builds up her own fortune, social norms for women slowly change, from the 1920s expectation that they wear ‘dresses down to their ankles’ right up to when they can publish intimate pictures on Facebook in the twenty-first century. After a long wait, in 2004, Chilean women are allowed to divorce. Rather than uniting with abusive Julián (who turns out to be using his aeroplane to traffic in drugs and collude with the Chilean police state), Violeta goes on to remarry a Norwegian bird-watcher who cherishes her country’s flora and fauna. After her second husband dies from a sudden heart attack, Violeta falls in love for a final time with a mysterious American ex-convict turned private eye. This lover helps when Violeta’s addict daughter Nieves goes missing. Later he agrees to pass as the father of Nieves’s son Camilo when the girl dies in childbirth having earlier survived a drug overdose. As with all her love interests, Violeta outlives the man when he passes away as a result of cancer.
Allende’s Violeta sometimes seems hackneyed and narrowly fixated on clothes, weight loss, and Julian’s seductive scent of ‘virile, healthy, vigorous’ manhood. Yet at its best moments, the novel is bigger than that. Beyond these surface preoccupations, the text imparts insights into Latin American history, blurring gendered distinctions between shallow and serious topics. Allende’s work also upends traditional depictions of adultery, explores desire between women, and captures the discontent of married life, all with an engaging lightness of touch.
Both Violeta and a minor character named Susana experience violence at the hands of their sexual partners. This prompts Violeta to call domestic violence an ‘epidemic’ and make it her mission to establish a foundation to support victims of abuse. Her descriptor is well-chosen, since the Covid-19 lockdown measures, which increased the amount of time people spent at home, meant that women across the globe stared down ‘a lethal virus outdoors and abusers at home’. During the Covid-19 response, like other Latin American administrations, the Chilean government enhanced helplines, added web and social media support, and maintained physical victim support centres for domestic violence survivors. Helpline calls surged by 80 percent in early 2020, but official complaints dropped. Feminist groups criticized the accessibility of these channels for victims confined with their aggressors, particularly noting the exclusion of disabled, Indigenous, and migrant women. Additionally, there was a noted increase in both physical and online gender-based violence, with specific threats against prominent women activists and leaders. Violeta’s fight against domestic violence mirrors real-world governmental and NGO actions, while a global reckoning with gender-based violence has been intensified by pandemic conditions.
The novel also glances at non-normative sexuality, particularly that of the young Violeta’s Irish tutor Miss Josephine Taylor who falls in love with a defiant feminist Treasa Rivas. Homophobia is lambasted via Julián’s attitude towards his and Violeta’s queer-presenting son Juan Martín, which reflects conservative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ individuals. Additionally, Allende addresses the heroin epidemic, with Violeta’s daughter Nieves succumbing to addiction. While there has recently been a fascination among American writers with the opioid epidemic, Allende’s narrative focuses on the individual and familial repercussions of an earlier wave of addiction.
Furthermore, Violeta addresses diseases beyond pandemics, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. Miss Taylor’s battle with, first, a benign but painful tumour and, later on, cancer serves as a reminder of the fragility of life. Meanwhile Violeta’s brother’s dementia highlights the toll of degenerative diseases on individuals and their loved ones.
It is suggestive that the novel’s fourth and final part has the counterintuitive title ‘Birth’, even though the section deals with the main character’s ageing towards death. This phase captures the rebirth of democracy in Chile, paralleling Violeta’s own regeneration in her twilight years. Spanning from the end of the dictatorship to the dawn of the new millennium and the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘Birth’ encapsulates a period of introspection, reconciliation with the past, and the continuation of Violeta’s life through her descendants. The section shadows forth ideas about illness, mortality, and the legacies passed onto future generations. As W. B. Yeats wrote about the Easter Rising around the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic, ‘A terrible beauty is born’.
In sum, Violeta is a hurtling tale whose telenovela-like storytelling intersects across time, space, and civic contexts. While Violeta may not stand out as one of Allende’s most accomplished works, dismissing it as trivial overlooks its significant contributions. The novel provocatively engages with personal and communal crises, bidding readers to reconsider the fallout from both historical and contemporary adversities. Ultimately, Allende’s expose of precarity amidst pandemics and other calamities invites reflection on longevity in the face of global challenges.