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'Allende's best work to date…she has everything it takes: the ear, the eye, the mind, the heart, the all-encompassing humanity.' New York Times
'Allende's writing is so vivid we smell the countryside, hear the sounds, see the bright birds, smell and even taste the soft fruit. Moving through Paula's last days, we enter that world, and share it, gladly, sadly, gratefully, and ultimately changed by the very reading of it.' Julia Neuberger, The Times
'This is a tender, moving and vivid record of a mother's agony at the bedside of her daughter. “Paula” begins as a long letter as a way of giving her back the life that is ebbing away…the result is a mesmerizing story. In flawlessly rich prose Allende shares with us her most intimate feelings…an emotionally charged, spellbinding memoir.' Washington Post
'Allende brings the natural storytelling power so evident in her novels to this courageous testament. She shares her personal tragedy with a warmth and passion that make “Paula” exceptional.' Sunday Express
Product Description
In December 1991, Allende’s daughter Paula, aged 26, fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. This book started as a letter to Paula written during the hours spent at her bedside, and became a personal memoir and a testament to the ties that bind families – a brave, enlightening, inspiring true story.
This book was written during the interminable hours the novelist Isabel Allende spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital, in her hotel room and beside her daughter 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.
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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.
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.
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