Review #4 of 2024: Largo Petaló de Mar

Amor lento, la dialéctica entre la democracia y la tirania, que significa hogar

Leí en un solo de día durante mi viaje por avión a Tejas por la boda de una amiga de la Universidad. Es muy fácil aburrirme en los aviones (la turbulencia hace difícil a mantener atención puesto en algo). Leer todo este libro, por las siete horas que duró mi viaje, es una gran reseña en si misma. 

Este es un libro histórico que sigue un familia desde los últimos años de la guerra civil en España tras su vida en Chile y el golpe de estado contra el gobierno de Allende hasta su vuelto del exilio en los años ochenta. Es una historia de un grande amor que viene de una matrimonio de utilidad, el desarrollo de las características de una persona durante todo su vida, y del país entero de Chile. Es una historia sobre que significa "ser" de un lugar o país, los enlaces confusos entre países sudamericanos y los ciclos de democracia y fascismo. 

Solo tengo dos críticas. La narrativa sobre la guerra civil fue un poco sesgado. No sé tanto sobre esta guerra, pero pienso que haya razones justos para la sublevación de la derecha, y había atrocidades cometidos por ambos bandos. El segundo fue que algunas escenas y etapas de las vidas de los protagonistas me parecen un poco parcas: quisiera más descripción o dialogo. Pero, supongo que eso sea el estilo de Allende. No sabría: este es mi primer libro de ella para adultos que he leído.

Synopsis

This book is the story of two interlinked families in Chile. The first, Victor and Roser Dalmau, are recent immigrants who flee to Chile from Catalonia after the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War on the Winnipeg, a ship funded by Pablo Neruda. The second, the extensive Del Solar family, has lived in Chile for hundreds of years. Largo Petaló de Mar (Long Sea Petal) relates how these two families interact with each other and with the changing political, economic, and social norms of Chile throughout the second two-thirds of the 20th century.

Overall Impressions

This is my first Allende book since the disastrous orientalist Reino del Dragon de Oro. I was much more impressed by this book, probably because it ties in much more closely to the author’s lived experience. Allende is Chilean, and has been in exile in the United States for most of her adult life, so she knows what she’s writing about here. Every page of Largo Petaló de Mar just dripped authenticity in a way that the books in her young adult trilogy did not. That said, I’m not sure how much of a fan I am of Allende’s writing style in general. There’s a lot of telling me what certain characters say, or how they feel, rather than showing me through dialogue and actions. This means that often times there’s not a lot of subtlety or nuance in the plot events or the emotions of the characters. We are told how to think and how to feel.

That said, I read this book in a day, and I got a lot out of it. I want to elaborate on three themes in the rest of this blog post: love over the long term, the dialectic between fascism and democracy, and what it means to call somewhere home. THE REST OF THE ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS

Love for the Long Term

We have this idea in modern culture that love is something that happens to you, rather than something that you do or choose. Love is a feeling that you are afflicted by, a state of being that you can’t control. While there certainly is something to be said about the initial spark of attraction being important, this over emphasis on feelings makes it difficult for relationships to last and grow. Feelings fade quickly when confronted with reality.

Love viewed as a promise, or a set of actions, makes much more sense. In this framework, you choose with every kiss and every kindness whether you love someone or not. Your feelings may change, but your duty does not. And in fact, the longer you practice this, the less likely it will be that they will. Love for your spouse or significant other starts to become as natural as brushing your teeth every morning.

This is reflected wonderfully in the love story that is central to the novel between Victor and Roger Dalmau. Roger is initially in love with Victor’s younger brother Guillem, but he dies during the battle on the Ebro River, leaving her alone and pregnant. In order to facilitate their immigration to Chile, Victor marries her out of convenience, and raises his nephew as his son. Although there is nothing romantic about their interactions for the first three years of their marriage, their shared commitment to each other and to their child draws them closer together until they begin to fall in love with each other. By the time Roger dies at the end of the novel, they are both convinced not only that they are the love of each other’s lives, but that they must be linked in other lives as well.

Contrast this to Victor’s short affair with Ofelia Del Solar. Although they claim that they love each other, their relationship falls apart at the first true test, that of Ofelia becoming pregnant.

In terms of my own life, this love story makes me think that I need to be more patient. Love blooms over time, and I need to keep people in my life who it blooms with. However, this is something that is certainly hard to balance with staying out of the friend zone. Promises have to be mutual in order to really work.

The Fascist/Democratic Dialectic

This was something that I felt was handled poorly by this book, and is a serious problem for historical fiction in general. When the plot of your story is set on a controversial historical backdrop, it’s tempting to make the explanations for historical events fit the story you’re trying to tell. One way to handle this is to make a secondary universe where you have the historical events mean whatever you want: Guy Gavriel Kay is the best example of someone doing this. Another way is to have the historical events just be backdrop. An example of this that I can think of off the top of my head is Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin, in which the Civil War is just thematic background to the vampires-on-steamboats of the main plot. A third way to do this well is really meticulous research and a devotion to accuracy. Javier Moro in El Imperio eres Tu did this really well with his history of the life of Pedro I of Brazil.

Largo Petaló de Mar attempts both of the last two strategies, and succeeds sometimes, and fails at other times. Things like the inclusion of Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda as characters, as well the description of the voyage of the Winnipeg worked well for me. However, the intended comparison between the coup d’etas of Pinochet and the Spanish Civil War didn’t really work well for me. There are fundamental differences as to why the two events occurred: the CIA was heavily involved in orchestrating the former, whereas the Spanish Civil War was instigated by a large, disaffected group of Spanish society. The Republicans were not innocent in the way that Allende was: as the book even acknowledges, there were attacks on churches, priests, and traditional facets of Spanish culture by the Republicans before the war broke out. Allende tries to portray the two events as being similar to enhance the sense of rootlessness of the protagonists, and in some ways that works: there are obvious parallels between the two conflicts and Pinochet did directly look up to Franco as a role model. But trying to make the comparison fit too strongly merely confuses our understanding of what actually happened and why.

Rootlessness

The final theme is something that hits really close to my heart. Victor and Roger spend a lot of their life in exile: first from their native Catalonia and later from their adopted home of Chile. Throughout the novel there is a profound sense of longing for home and community, that only in the final few chapters do the protagonists realize is in Chile.

I have never been exiled from my native land, but sometimes it feels like we in the modern West are all exiles. We are so busy chasing economic and status opportunities that we forget how important community and continuity are to our proper emotional health. I’ve been moving from city to city most of my adult life and so have my peers, and I think it’s very draining on all of our psyches.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the plot and characters of this book, although not so much the writing style. Although there were some problems with the historical elements of the narrative, the themes of love and home really touched my heart, and my brain.