Portrait in Sepia (Involuntary/Daughter of Fortune Trilogy #2)

Amazon.com Review Isabel Allende has established herself as one of the most consummate of all modern storytellers, a reputation that is confirmed in her novel Portrait in Sepia . Allende offers a compelling saga of the turbulent history, lives, and loves of late 19th-century Chile, drawing on characters from her earlier novels, The House of Spirits and Daughter of Fortune . In typical Allende fashion, Portrait in Sepia is crammed with love, desire, tragedy, and dark family secrets, all played out against the dramatic backdrop of revolutionary Chile. Our heroine Aurora del Valle's mother is a Chilean-Chinese beauty, while her father is a dissolute scion of the wealthy and powerful del Valle family. At the heart of Aurora's slow, painful re-creation of her childhood towers one of Allende's greatest fictional creations, the heroine's grandmother, Paulina del Valle. An "astute, bewigged Amazon with a gluttonous appetite," Paulina holds both the del Valle family and Allende's novel together as she presides over Aurora's adolescence in a haze of pastries, taffeta, and overweening love. One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is Allende's decision to turn her heroine into a photographer: "through photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past." There is little confusion in Allende's elegantly crafted and hugely enjoyable novel. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk From Publishers Weekly HIn this third work concerning the various and intertwining lives of members of a Chilean family, Allende uses the metaphor of photography as memory. "Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story; I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses that luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone for telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia," declares Aurora del Valle, protagonist of the tale. Here, Allende picks up where 1999's Daughter of Fortune left off, and, in the course of her chronicles, mentions personages who were realized in her 1987 masterpiece, House of the Spirits. Like her other novels, Portrait in Sepia spans nearly 50 years and covers wars, love affairs, births, weddings and funerals. Rich and complex, this international, turn-of-the-century saga does not disappoint. The book opens as 30-year-old Aurora remembers her own birth, in the Chinatown of 1880 San Francisco. She tells of those present: her maternal, Chilean-English grandmother, Eliza; her grandfather Tao (a Chinese medic); and her mother, Lynn, a beloved beauty who dies during Aurora's birth. Realizing she is getting ahead of herself, Aurora backtracks, inviting the reader to be patient and listen to the events surrounding her life, from 1862 to 1910. Through Aurora, Allende exercises her supreme storytelling abilities, of which strong, passionate characters are paramount. Most memorable is Aurora's paternal grandmother, Paulina del Valle, an enormous woman who eats pastries and runs her trading company with equally reckless abandon. Like Paulina, Allende attacks her subject with gusto, making this a grand installment in an already impressive repertoire. Major ad/promo; 7-city author tour. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. ϡ쯦랠 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.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. Una obra de extraordinaria dimension humana que eleva la narrativa de la autora a cotas de perfeccion literariaNarrada en la voz de una joven mujer, esta es una magnifica novela historica, situada a finales del siglo XIX en Chile, y una portentosa saga familiar en la que reencontramos algunos personajes de Hija de la fortun a y de La casa de los espiritus, novelas cumbre en la obra de Isabel Allende. El tema principal es la memoria y los secretos de familia. La protagonista, Aurora del Valle, sufre un trauma brutal que determina su caracter y borra de su mente los primeros cinco años de su vida. Criada por su ambiciosa abuela, Paulina del Valle, crece en un ambiente privilegiado, libre de muchas de las limitaciones que oprimen a las mujeres de su epoca, pero atormentada por horribles pesadillas. Cuando debe afrontar la traicion del hombre que ama y la soledad, decide explorar el misterio de su pasado. Una obra de extraordinaria dimension humana que eleva la narrativa de la autora a cotas de perfeccion literaria. Portrait in Sepia is both a historical novel set at the end of the 19th century in Chile and a family saga peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits, two of Allende's most celebrated novels I came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco, in the home of my maternal grandparents. Vine al mundo un martes de otono de 1880, bajo el techo de mis abuelos maternos, en San Francisco.