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Overview
Portrait in Sepia is the best book Allende has published in the United States since her first novel of nearly two decades ago, The House of the Spirits." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
"Portrait in Sepia tightens the weave of a multigenerational fantasy as complete and inspiring as the real world it parallels ... Allende's enchanting historical universe keeps expanding and Portrait in Sepia is a new galactic jewel." --Chicago Tribune
A sequel to Daughter of Fortune, New York Times bestselling author, Isabel Allende, continues her magic with this spellbinding family saga set against war and economic hardship.
Aurora del Valle suffers a brutal trauma that erases from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by horrible nightmares. When she is forced to recognize her betrayal at the hands of the man she loves, and to cope with the resulting solitude, she decides to explore the mystery of her past.
Portrait in Sepia is an extraordinary achievement: richly detailed, epic in scope, intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780061991530 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 05/11/2010 |
Series: | Harper Perennial Deluxe Editions |
Pages: | 304 |
Sales rank: | 358,977 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
Lexile: | 1280L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Isabel Allende is the author of twelve works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Maya's Notebook, Island Beneath the Sea, Inés of My Soul, Daughter of Fortune, and a novel that has become a world-renowned classic, The House of the Spirits. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, she lives in California.
Hometown:
San Rafael, CaliforniaDate of Birth:
August 2, 1942Place of Birth:
Lima, PeruWebsite:
http://www.isabelallende.comRead an Excerpt
Chapter One
I came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco, in the home of my maternal grandparents. While inside that labyrinthine wood house my mother panted and pushed, her valiant heart and desperate bones laboring to open a way out to me, the savage life of the Chinese quarter was seething outside, with its unforgettable aroma of exotic food, its deafening torrent of shouted dialects, its inexhaustible swarms of human bees hurrying back and forth. I was born in the early morning, but in Chinatown the clocks obey no rules, and at that hour the market, the cart traffic, the woeful barking of caged dogs awaiting the butcher's cleaver, were beginning to heat up. I have come to know the details of my birth rather late in life, but it would have been worse not to discover them at all, they could have been lost forever in the cracks and crannies of oblivion. There are so many secrets in my family that I may never have time to unveil them all: truth is short-lived, watered down by torrents of rain. My maternal grandparents welcomed me with emotion -- even though according to several witnesses I was ugly as sin -- and placed me at my mother's breast, where I lay cuddled for a few minutes, the only ones I was to have with her. Afterward my uncle Lucky blew his breath in my face to pass his good luck on to me. His intention was generous and the method infallible, because at least for these first thirty years of my life, things have gone well. But careful! I don't want to get ahead of myself. This is a long story, and it begins before my birth; it requires patience in the telling and even more in thelistening. If I lose the thread along the way, don't despair, because you can count on picking it up a few pages further on. Since we have to begin at some date, let's make it 1862, and let's say, to choose something at random, that the story begins with a piece of furniture of unlikely proportions.
Paulina del Valle's bed was ordered from Florence the year following the coronation of Victor Emmanuel, when in the new kingdom of Italy the echoes of Garibaldi's cannon shots were still reverberating. It crossed the ocean, dismantled, in a Genoese vessel, was unloaded in New York in the midst of a bloody strike, and was transferred to one of the steamships of the shipping line of my paternal grandparents, the Rodriguez de Santa Cruzes, Chileans residing in the United States. It was the task of Captain John Sommers to receive the crates marked in Italian with a single word: naiads. That robust English seaman, of whom all that remains is a faded portrait and a leather trunk badly scuffed from infinite sea journeys and filled with strange manuscripts, was my great-grandfather, as I found out recently when my past finally began to come clear after many years of mystery. I never met Captain John Sommers, the father of Eliza Sommers, my maternal grandmother, but from him I inherited a certain bent for wandering. To that man of the sea, pure horizon and salt, fell the task of transporting the Florentine bed in the hold of his ship to the other side of the American continent. He had to make his way through the Yankee blockade and Confederate attacks, sail to the southern limits of the Atlantic, pass through the treacherous waters of the Strait of Magellan, sail into the Pacific Ocean, and then, after putting in briefly at several South American ports, point the bow of his ship toward northern California, that venerable land of gold. He had precise orders to open the crates on the pier in San Francisco, supervise the ship's carpenter while he assembled the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, taking care not to nick the carvings, install the mattress and ruby-colored canopy, set the whole construction on a cart, and dispatch it at a leisurely pace to the heart of the city. The coachman was to make two complete turns around Union Square, and another two -- while jingling a little bell -- before the balcony of my grandfather's concubine, before depositing it at its final destination, the home of Paulina del Valle. This fanfaronade was to be performed in the midst of the Civil War, when Yankee and Confederate armies were massacring each other in the South and no one was in any mood for jokes or little bells. John Sommers fulfilled the instructions cursing, because during months of sailing that bed had come to symbolize what he most detested about his job: the whims of his employer, Paulina del Valle. When he saw the bed displayed on the cart, he sighed and decided that that would be the last thing he would ever do for her. He had spent twelve years following her orders and had reached the limits of his patience. That bed still exists, intact. It is a weighty dinosaur of polychrome wood; the headboard is presided over by the god Neptune surrounded by foaming waves and undersea creatures in bas-relief, and the foot, frolicking dolphins and cavorting sirens. Within a few hours, half of San Francisco had the opportunity to appreciate that Olympian bed. My grandfather's amour, however, the one to whom the spectacle was dedicated, hid as the cart went by, and then went by a second time with its little bell.
"My triumph lasted about a minute," Paulina confessed to me many years later, when I insisted on photographing the bed and knowing all the details. "The joke backfired on me. I thought everyone would make fun of Feliciano, but they turned it on me. I misjudged. Who would have imagined such hypocrisy? In those days San Francisco was a hornet's nest of corrupt politicians, bandits, and loose women."...
Portrait in Sepia. Copyright © by Isabel Allende. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Reading Group Guide
Introduction
"Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story," says Aurora del Valle, the heroine of Isabel Allende's newest novel. "I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia." Aurora is referring to a technique in old-fashioned portraiture, one that results in a soft and dreamlike, rather than sharp, image. Likewise, Aurora's personal history is shadowy. Her mother died hours after she was born; her father was a stranger. Aurora's memories of early childhood are a mixture of family legend and hazy images, one of which haunts her for years. She pieces together her past through stories told to her by her many relatives. Like a child wandering through a maze, each piece of new information illuminates a dark corner of her life, and explains mysteries that both confounded and thwarted her. Aurora's story takes readers on a remarkable journey from San Francisco's grandest Nob Hill mansions to its thriving yet nearly invisible Chinese community. It places us in the stifling living rooms of traditional Chilean society and then hurls us across the country's rugged landscape to its spacious farms and ranches. We witness the violence and brutality of the Chilean revolution, as well as the cruel oppression of women in Chinese society. As in her previous novels, Allende's enormous talent for blending history and fiction are in wondrous evidence. More than just a vehicle for teaching us some important historical lessons, Aurora emerges as a complex andrewarding character with a fascinating story of her own. As she matures from a timid girl unsure of who she is or where she came from to a strong and willful young woman with a clear sense of what she wants, Aurora's life reflects the elements of her heritage, whether she realizes it or not. She possesses her paternal grandmother's open-mindedness and loyalty; her maternal grandmother's stubbornness and kindness. She inherited her biological father's artistic flair; her mother's romanticism; and, eventually, her grandfather's quiet confidence. Aurora is also a product of her multicultural past. Part Chilean, part Chinese, part English, she feels no strong affinity to any culture. In separating from her husband, she has removed herself from Chilean society. When she looks at a photograph of herself as a young child, she doesn't recognize the girl dressed in a coat of Chinese silk. And yet she is haunted by a dream in which she is that little girl. A dream that doesn't make sense until she learns, at last, the details of her birth. How much are we a product of our past? Is it important to know where we came from? What happens when the truth is different from what we thought? Allende attempts to answer these questions in this novel that is as full of twists and turns as a mountain road, as broad in scope as the estates of a Chilean patrone. Her portrait of Aurora's life -- from the time she was adopted by her paternal grandmother, to her emergence as a talented photographer and independent woman -- speaks volumes about history, politics, racism and sexism. But it also reveals an intricately constructed and fully developed character. Aurora's past may be hazy and filled with shadows, but her character is as sharply etched and indelible as the finest photographic print. Discussion Questions