Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101962 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Synopsis
In December 1991, Allende's daughter Paula, aged 26, fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. This book started as a letter to Paula written during the hours spent at her bedside, and became a personal memoir and a testament to the ties that bind families - a brave, enlightening, inspiring true story. This book was written during the interminable hours the novelist Isabel Allende spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital, in her hotel room and beside her daughter Paula's bed during the summer and autumn of 1992. Faced with the loss of her child, Isabel Allende turned to storytelling, to sustain her own spirit and to convey to her daughter the will to wake up, to survive. The story she tells is that of her own life, her family history and the tragedy of her nation, Chile, in the years leading up to Pinochet's brutal military coup.

Customer Reviews

Allende on top form - but a harrowing central theme
I read this book for two reasons. Firstly, because I love Allende's writing. I have all her books and I have even bought three of her novels in Spanish, as an incentive to make progress with the language. The second reason is that my secretary's daughter died in '02, after many years of slow decline, at the same age as Paula.

I hoped I might find something in the heart-wrenching account that Allende gives us of Paula's plight that might help me help my friend in her grief. The description of Paula's illness and death is masterfully written. Allende spares herself and us nothing in the intensity of her description: this comes through even in the midst of the dreadful pain that Allende suffered and continues to suffer. On finishing the book, completely wrung out by the end, I felt that there is nothing comparable to the grief of a mother bereaved. What Allende has described with such searing clarity, the furious, inconsolable grief of a mother whose child has died, is what I see in the eyes my friend. Those without children, as I am, cannot visit that place.

Her description of her family and Chile and life, alternating with the passages of the account of Paula's passing, are intriguing and colourful in the best Allende fashion. An interesting aspect, for me, is in trying to gauge how much Allende the story-teller is predominant over Allende the factual writer. After all, she admits that she has 40 versions of how she met her second husband - and he says they're all true. However embroidered her account of her family and life in Chile and elsewhere might be, it's rich in atmosphere and spirit, as we have come to know of Allende's writing - and it is blessed relief from the rigours of her account of her daughter's final year.

A tough and touching book.

very touching but a bit pretentious
I've read a number of Isabel Allende books and found them all a very good read. Paula was the last one I read and felt really touched by the tragedy of Allende's daughter. The first part was written during Paula's stay in a hospital in Madrid and makes you feel as if you were there Allende and listened to her stories from the past. However the second part was written some years after Paula's death and seems to me a little pretentious and concentrates on the life story and greatness the author. Still a very good read, but however difficult it might be to criticise when someone writes about their own personal tragedy it is not the best of Allende's books.

Moving and Inspiring
I have read Allende's work before and was aware of this particular book. But I was not sure what led me to read Paula. My motivation most probably would have been trying to deal with an illness that has befallen a family member close to me. What Allende did do was allow me to better understand the complexities, mysteries and anger of dealing with such tragic events.

Paula is very accesible to read, yet operates on many levels. It allows the reader to take out of the book both deep emotional meaning or just enjoy, albeit with great sorrow, the amazing and unique style of Allende.

Read this if you are interested in how national and international politics and changing social mores affect one family; how humans confront the manifold experiences, good and bad, laid before us. As trite as it sounds, Paula reminded me there is more to life than the immediate moment and surroundings. It shows us to both live life to the fullest, but also be patient when times are hard. Or simply read Paula if you are after a great piece of writing that would be fitting for a fictional novel, if it were not for the real tragedy that inspired it.

Befitting Allende's style of writing, magic-realism transcends the book, especially Allende's references to the spirits of her family that come to her at certain times. The meaning I drew from this was that we can draw inspiration, reflect and use our memories of those past to guide us forward and assist us in times of sadness, or emphasise the happiness we feel other times.