Again I have to thank the University of ILLINOIS alumni book club for introducing me to a book I loved.
Before it was The Glass Hotel by one of my now favorite authors!
My most recent book club read is A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende.
This 2020 (translated from Spanish) novel is historical fiction that begins during the Spanish Civil war.
Victor, an army doctor working for the Republicans against Franco learns his brother who had been fighting for the same cause has been killed, leaving his pregnant girlfriend Roser who has already become part of the family.
Victor and Roser are forced to flee Spain and take the opportunity to board a boat organized by a Spanish poet Pablo Neruda to take more than 2000 Spaniards to settle in Chile, “the long petal of the sea and wine and snow” as he had referred to his homeland in poetry. But to take the passage together, they must marry.
The book is a long winding love story of refugees and the lives they choose through so many trials. And each chapter starts with a verse of Neruda’s poetry.
Years later Neruda remembered the evening The Winnipeg left for Chili with the refugees, many weeping and singing songs and knowing they would likely never return to their homeland:
“Critics can erase all of my poetry if they wish. But this poem, that I recall today, cannot be erased by anyone.”
I loved this book and hope you will too!
