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Summary
Summary
Born into slavery on the island of Saint-Domingue, teenager Tete and her fellow slaves find solace in what remains of their African heritage. But when 20-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 and purchases Tete as his bride, he comes to rely upon her heavily. Over the course of four decades, Tete learns of humanity's great potential for both progress and cruelty.
Summary
Born on the island of Saint-Domingue, ZaritÉ-known as TÉtÉ-is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, he purchases young TÉtÉ for his bride. Yet it is he who will become dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.Against the merciless backdrop of sugar cane fields, the lives of TÉtÉ and Valmorain grow ever more intertwined. When the bloody revolution of Toussaint Louverture arrives, they flee the brutal conditions of the French colony that will become Haiti for the raucous, free-wheeling enterprise of New Orleans. There, TÉtÉ finally forges a new life, but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not easily severed. Isabel Allende crafts the riveting story of one woman's determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been so battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruelest of circumstances.
Author Notes
Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. When her parents separated, young Isabel moved with her mother to Chile, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She married at the age of 19 and had two children, Paula and Nicolas. Her uncle was Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. When he was overthrown in the coup of 1973, she fled Chile, moving to Caracas, Venezuela.
While living in Venezuela, Allende began writing her novels, many of them exploring the close family bonds between women. Her first novel, The House of the Spirits, has been translated into 27 languages, and was later made into a film. She then wrote Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, all set in Latin America. The Infinite Plan was her first novel to take place in the United States. She explores the issues of human rights and the plight of immigrants and refugees in her novel, In The Midst of Winter. In Paula, Allende wrote her memoirs in connection with her daughter's illness and death. She delved into the erotic connections between food and love in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses.
In addition to writing books, Allende has worked as a TV interviewer, magazine writer, school administrator, and a secretary at a U.N. office in Chile. She received the 1996 Harold Washington Literacy Award. She lives in California. Her title Maya's Notebook made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2013.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
IT was an art critic who coined the term "magic realism," to describe a new wave of painting in 1920s Germany. The work departed from the moody Expressionism of the day, emphasizing material reality even as it unlocked an elusive otherworldliness in the arrangement of everyday objects. Sometimes, though, the fantastic rubbed elbows with the real: in one painting, a fat general nonchalantly shares a table with headless men in tuxedos. In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. So critics devised the label "magical feminism" just for Isabel Allende's multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her latest novel, "Island Beneath the Sea," which is set partly in late-18th-century Haiti. The protagonist, a mulatto slave named Zarité, is maid to a sugar planter's wife who gradually goes mad. (The Caribbean seems to have had a reliably deranging effect on women in fiction, from "Jane Eyre" onward.) Even before her mistress's death, Zarité becomes the concubine of her master, Valmorain, submitting to that role across decades and borders, even when he flees to New Orleans after the 1791 slave revolt. The resulting canvas contains no less than the revolutionary history of the world's first black republic as Allende portrays the island's various factions: republicans versus monarchists, blacks versus mulattoes, abolitionists versus planters, slaves versus masters. She revels in period detail: ostrich-feathered hats, high-waisted gowns, meals featuring suckling pigs with cherries. Her cast is equally vibrant: a quadroon courtesan and the French officer who marries her; Valmorain's second wife, a controlling Louisiana Creole; Zarité's rebel lover, who joins Toussaint L'Ouverture in the hills. But for all its entertaining sweep, the story lacks complex characterization and originality. And its style is traditional. Where, you wonder, are the headless men - or, in Allende's case, headless women? Where is the magical realism? What "magic" there is in the novel appears at the intersection of Haitian history and the voodoo-influenced folklore of the slaves. Indeed, Haiti inspired one of the earliest literary uses of the term "magic realism." After a 1943 trip there, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier wrote an influential essay arguing that in the natural landscape and politics of the Americas, reality was already fantastical. His fictional expression of this argument, "The Kingdom of This World," which also features the slave revolt, clearly inspired Allende. Both novels contain an episode that exemplifies the role of the supernatural in Haitian history, but Allende's guarded approach reflects a drift from the experimental mode that distinguished her early work. In 1758, the plantocracy burned alive a rebel leader, François Macandal, a one-armed runaway slave and voodoo priest. Legend has it that he escaped the flames by turning himself into a mosquito. "Macandal had often entered the mysterious world of the insects," Carpentier's novel explains, "making up for the lack of his human arm with the possession of several feet, four wings or long antennae." But in Allende's rendition it is all, disappointingly, just a matter of perspective: "The whites ... saw Macandal's charred body. The Negroes saw nothing but the empty post." In a welcome revision, Allende brings women to the forefront of the story of the rebellion. She replaces the African war god Ogun with the love goddess Erzulie. (In the one episode that most approaches magic realism, Erzulie possesses Zarité, but even then it's unclear whether this is merely happening in Zarité's imagination.) Ultimately, however, Allende has traded innovative language and technique for a fundamentally straightforward historical pageant. There is plenty of melodrama and coincidence in "Island Beneath the Sea," but not much magic. In a welcome revision, Allende brings women to the forefront of the story of the Haitian slave rebellion. Gaiutra Bahadur is writing a book about plantation-era women in the West Indies.
Library Journal Review
Allende's Daughter of Fortune (2008) sold 15,000 copies on audio; simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hc (250,000-copy first printing); ten-city tour; narrator TBA. Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
