Login
Top voted Isabel Allende images
Added to
"MAYA´S NOTEBOOK" BY ISABEL ALLENDE:
Review With this latest novel, the author has opted for a grittier, more realist-driven story of a much younger protagonist to pair with her ubiquitous and irrepressible voice
By: Dimitri Nasrallah Published on Mon Aug 12 2013
Maya’s Notebook, Isabel Allende’s 18th work, is a departure for a bestselling author who has built a strong international reputation on colourful epics, mostly focused on her native Chile, that exude their author’s affections in style and intent. Vivid, widely acclaimed early novels such as 1982’s The House of the Spirits won over a sizeable international readership with her chatty, generous writing voice and flares of magic realism that garnered comparisons — superficial ones, some would argue — to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
However, Allende’s later works haven’t always succeeded with these same ingredients. With this latest novel, the author has opted for a grittier, more realist-driven story of a much younger protagonist to pair with her ubiquitous and irrepressible voice. Crime, gangs, drugs, alcohol — these are the circumstances Allende has brought in to situate Maya’s Notebook, to questionable effect.
Born to an absentee mother and a pilot father, 19-year-old Maya Vidal has been living on the streets of Berkeley and getting involved with gangs ever since her beloved grandfather, Popo, died of pancreatic cancer. Raised by Popo and Nini (her Chilean grandmother), Maya’s world has fallen apart at the loss of her pillar, and so for several years the teenager’s grief spirals out of control, first with alcohol, then drugs and low-level crime, culminating in a supposedly life-threatening string of addiction and bad judgment that has the mob, the FBI and Interpol all chasing after her.
That would have been a fine, if potentially over-dramatic novel to read if Allende had approached this material from a more engaged vantage point. But by the time we first meet Maya, Nini has already shipped her off into hiding, to the remote Chilean island of Chiloé. Nini has asked the troubled young woman to keep a notebook of her reflections while detoxing in her new exile. “Write down the monumental stupidities you’ve committed,” Maya writes of her Nini’s request, “see if you can come to grips with them”.
As its stands, this notebook distances the reader from the meat of this story, a technique that Allende has a hard time overcoming. It also creates a conflict with the author’s central strength, her voice. Maya may well be a “wise soul”, but she doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination read like a streetwise 19-year-old who’s just been shoved off on a year’s-long battle with drugs and alcohol against her will. She has too much wisdom, too much nuanced maturity, and too deep an understanding of people, qualities that read more like 70-year-old Allende instead of her character.
So 19-year-old Maya’s 70-year-old soul itches to reflect on her young life as if writing a memoir. With a rueful and too-wise novelist’s duty, the story of Maya’s origins and childhood is delivered in useful and cleanly organized entries: why her parents are mostly out of the picture, how Nini and Popo are monumental figures in her life. Along the way, Maya acts as an international reader’s tourist guide to Chiloé’s desolate beauty and overlooked villagers with an energy and verve bereft of many 19-year-olds, studiously reporting anthropological details and historical curiosities. The islanders seem happy enough to live at a pace and philosophy that at first seems impossible to young Maya, fresh off the streets of Berkeley.
What of those streets, the reader keeps asking, though not in a way that’s necessarily satisfying or compelling. Isn’t this recent past fresh in Maya’s mind, if not tormenting her with withdrawal? Armed with a compunction and resolve of a woman well beyond her years, Maya has conveniently tucked away her life-threatening addictions without so much as a temptation from the moment she arrives in Chiloé and the novel begins.
As the issues we expect to shape Maya’s personality turn out to be exposed authorial scaffolding instead of meaty young-adult challenges, a lingering irritation set in as the supposed notebook, itself less and less authentic, gets longer and longer.
Review With this latest novel, the author has opted for a grittier, more realist-driven story of a much younger protagonist to pair with her ubiquitous and irrepressible voice
By: Dimitri Nasrallah Published on Mon Aug 12 2013
Maya’s Notebook, Isabel Allende’s 18th work, is a departure for a bestselling author who has built a strong international reputation on colourful epics, mostly focused on her native Chile, that exude their author’s affections in style and intent. Vivid, widely acclaimed early novels such as 1982’s The House of the Spirits won over a sizeable international readership with her chatty, generous writing voice and flares of magic realism that garnered comparisons — superficial ones, some would argue — to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
However, Allende’s later works haven’t always succeeded with these same ingredients. With this latest novel, the author has opted for a grittier, more realist-driven story of a much younger protagonist to pair with her ubiquitous and irrepressible voice. Crime, gangs, drugs, alcohol — these are the circumstances Allende has brought in to situate Maya’s Notebook, to questionable effect.
Born to an absentee mother and a pilot father, 19-year-old Maya Vidal has been living on the streets of Berkeley and getting involved with gangs ever since her beloved grandfather, Popo, died of pancreatic cancer. Raised by Popo and Nini (her Chilean grandmother), Maya’s world has fallen apart at the loss of her pillar, and so for several years the teenager’s grief spirals out of control, first with alcohol, then drugs and low-level crime, culminating in a supposedly life-threatening string of addiction and bad judgment that has the mob, the FBI and Interpol all chasing after her.
That would have been a fine, if potentially over-dramatic novel to read if Allende had approached this material from a more engaged vantage point. But by the time we first meet Maya, Nini has already shipped her off into hiding, to the remote Chilean island of Chiloé. Nini has asked the troubled young woman to keep a notebook of her reflections while detoxing in her new exile. “Write down the monumental stupidities you’ve committed,” Maya writes of her Nini’s request, “see if you can come to grips with them”.
As its stands, this notebook distances the reader from the meat of this story, a technique that Allende has a hard time overcoming. It also creates a conflict with the author’s central strength, her voice. Maya may well be a “wise soul”, but she doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination read like a streetwise 19-year-old who’s just been shoved off on a year’s-long battle with drugs and alcohol against her will. She has too much wisdom, too much nuanced maturity, and too deep an understanding of people, qualities that read more like 70-year-old Allende instead of her character.
So 19-year-old Maya’s 70-year-old soul itches to reflect on her young life as if writing a memoir. With a rueful and too-wise novelist’s duty, the story of Maya’s origins and childhood is delivered in useful and cleanly organized entries: why her parents are mostly out of the picture, how Nini and Popo are monumental figures in her life. Along the way, Maya acts as an international reader’s tourist guide to Chiloé’s desolate beauty and overlooked villagers with an energy and verve bereft of many 19-year-olds, studiously reporting anthropological details and historical curiosities. The islanders seem happy enough to live at a pace and philosophy that at first seems impossible to young Maya, fresh off the streets of Berkeley.
What of those streets, the reader keeps asking, though not in a way that’s necessarily satisfying or compelling. Isn’t this recent past fresh in Maya’s mind, if not tormenting her with withdrawal? Armed with a compunction and resolve of a woman well beyond her years, Maya has conveniently tucked away her life-threatening addictions without so much as a temptation from the moment she arrives in Chiloé and the novel begins.
As the issues we expect to shape Maya’s personality turn out to be exposed authorial scaffolding instead of meaty young-adult challenges, a lingering irritation set in as the supposed notebook, itself less and less authentic, gets longer and longer.