Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
There is a version of Latin America that exists primarily for export. It is a continent of the senses, a place of vibrant colours, turbulent passions, and a kind of magical, fatalistic wisdom. Its people, we are told, are more intimately acquainted with both life and death; they endure dictatorships and earthquakes with the same fiery stoicism with which they conduct their love affairs. They are not drab or neurotic or calculating. They are pathologically alive. This is a powerful and enduring brand, and for half a century, its most successful purveyor has been Isabel Allende. Her latest epic, Violeta, is a masterclass in its deployment. It is also, if you read it with one eye open, one of the most quietly pessimistic novels of recent years.
The book arrives wrapped in the familiar comforts of its genre. A hundred-year saga spanning from the Spanish Flu to the coronavirus, it is, on its surface, a celebration of a remarkable life. The titular Violeta, we are told, is a woman whose story is interesting ‘not so much for my virtues as for my sins’. She is a monument to female strength, to the indomitable life force that persists through political upheaval, personal tragedy, and economic collapse. The novel is, by all accounts, a rich, passionate, and deeply satisfying read. It is also a trap.
Because the central, unspoken argument of Violeta is that this very vitality, this celebrated Latin American passion, is not a tool for liberation but a beautifully decorated coping mechanism. It is a cultural anaesthetic that makes a century of cyclical trauma bearable, but does absolutely nothing to break the cycle itself. The novel, for all its beauty, is a testament not to progress, but to a glamorous, tragic, and seemingly endless loop of suffering.
An Exportable Soul
The architecture of the novel is its most damning tell. Spanning exactly one hundred years, from one pandemic to another, it creates a sense of epic sweep. But what, in that century, has truly changed? Violeta lives through the Great Depression, military coups, the rise and fall of ideologies, periods of terror and moments of hope. And yet, the fundamental precarity of her world remains constant. The family fortune is lost, then rebuilt, then threatened again. Lovers come and go, bringing with them ecstasy and ruin in equal measure. Governments rise and fall like the tides. ‘Here,’ Violeta notes, ‘everyone was used to the earth trembling and the sea raging’. This is presented as a kind of profound, earthy wisdom. It is not. It is a statement of profound political failure.
The ‘magical realism’ for which Allende, the so-called ‘Marquez in a skirt’, is famous is the crucial ingredient in this palliative cocktail. It is the literary device that allows the intolerable to become mythic. When the family doctor is too busy with the dying to attend a birth, it is not a sign of a collapsed state, but a “routine matter” to be handled with rustic self-reliance. When death is an ever-present neighbour – in the form of grandmothers, pets, or livestock for the stew pot – it is presented as a healthy, un-sanitised relationship with mortality. This is the great confidence trick of the genre. It takes the symptoms of chronic instability – state failure, endemic violence, systemic poverty – and reframes them as sources of a unique, tragic, and deeply marketable cultural wisdom.
It’s just business. Good business.
A few years ago, I was in a vibrant city market, a riot of sound and smell. It was exactly the kind of place a novelist like Allende would render with breathtaking skill. A few streets away, there was grinding, inescapable poverty. The tourist experience, and the literary one, is designed to focus on the former, to see the passion of the market as the defining truth, whilst treating the poverty as unfortunate but ultimately separate background detail. Allende’s genius is to fuse the two, to suggest that the passion is, in fact, because of the poverty and the pain. It is a powerful, romantic, and deeply conservative idea.
The Hundred-Year Loop
The novel’s celebration of ‘sins’ over ‘virtues’ is central to this ideological project. Violeta’s life is a whirlwind of illicit affairs, questionable business dealings, and a fierce, unapologetic pursuit of her own desires. This is framed as a form of female empowerment, a rebellion against the strictures of a patriarchal society. And on a personal level, perhaps it is. But on a political one, it is a retreat. In a world where stable, ‘virtuous’ structures – reliable governments, the rule of law, safe institutions – are non-existent, a life of passionate sin is not a choice. It is the only available alternative. It is a pivot from the public sphere, which is a source of nothing but chaos, to the private sphere of the body and the heart, the only domain where one can exercise a semblance of control.
One could argue, of course, that this is a cynical reading. That the novel is simply a testament to human resilience, a story of finding joy amidst chaos, which is a noble and universal theme. But this is to wilfully ignore the price of that resilience. To celebrate this endless cycle of endurance is to romanticize the conditions that make it necessary. It is like praising the beautiful songs of prisoners without questioning the existence of the prison itself. The immense strength of characters like Violeta is spent not on changing their world, but on surviving it. All that energy, all that passion, is ultimately consumed by the act of enduring.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the novel feels like a sophisticated machine for manufacturing nostalgia for a past that should, by all rights, be horrifying. It functions in the same way as those curated ‘Christmas letters’ Violeta so amusingly disdains – the ones that report only on successes and travels, never on bankruptcies or divorces. Allende’s novel is the grand, Latin American version of that letter. It acknowledges the pain, yes, but it styles it so beautifully, makes it feel so essential to the fabric of life, that it ceases to be a problem to be solved and becomes, instead, an identity to be cherished.
The true cultural legacy of this kind of storytelling is not empowerment. It is a form of learned helplessness, dressed up in the most beautiful clothes. It teaches that the world is a churning, chaotic sea, and the best one can do is learn to be a magnificent surfer. It never dares to ask if we might, one day, be able to calm the waters. After a hundred years of Violeta’s passionate, sinful, and resilient life, the world is still just as treacherous, the ground just as shaky. For all the living she does, nothing is ever truly built. That is the book’s real, unspoken, and devastating tragedy.
