Product Description

In December 1991, Isabel Allende's daughter Paula, aged 26 fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. This book was written during the interminable hours the novelist spent in the corridors of the Madrid hospital, in her hotel room and beside 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #266307 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-22
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

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.

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.

I have never recommended a book so highly and so frequently
I can't believe no-one else has yet reviewed this book! I haven't stopped recommending it since I read it last year. One of the reviewers of this book referred to it as 'melodramatic in the best sense of the word' and this is the essence of why this book is so compelling. The stories contained in this novel provide an extended expression of a mother's love for her daughter and like a mother's love the book is passionate and simultaneously sentimental. The boisterous, funny and poignant images of Allende family life that are evoked are familiar to all. Yet the South American influence gives the story a colour, clarity and a depth that take it outside the realm of the domestic. I can't imagine anyone not enjoying this novel. The sentimental will cry buckets, the passionate will recognise characters as themselves, the 'sensible' will hanker after a life lived with such extreme feeling and spirituality, the hard hearted will be shamed into compassion in the presence of a desolated mother at the death of a beloved and incredible daughter. NB. I read this novel whilst working on the Reception of the Institutional Banking department of the Commonwealth Bank, Sydney, Australia. My sincere apologies to those visitors who, on interruping my reading, were met with my tearful red eyed expression - Read it for yourselves and abandon any hopes of maintaining your composure.