Allende’s fluidly written saga conveys her deep familiarity with the events she depicts, and her intent to illustrate their human impact in a moving way. The scope spans most of the lives of Victor Dalmau, a Republican army medic in 1936 Spain, and Roser Bruguera, a music student taken in by Victor’s family and, later, his brother Guillem’s lover and the mother of Guillem’s child. The story follows them over nearly sixty years, beginning with the tumult of the Spanish Civil War. Guillem is killed fighting against the Fascists, news that Victor can’t bear to tell Roser initially. After surviving separate and terrible circumstances that leave them refugees in France, where authorities treat them with contempt and worse, the two marry for practical reasons in order to join Pablo Neruda’s mission transporting over 2000 Spanish exiles to Chile aboard the S.S. Winnipeg . In Santiago, the Dalmaus find many Chileans sympathetic to the Spaniards, while others make them unwelcome. With a poetic ...
And here's the second half of my interview with David Blixt about his new novel What Girls Are Good For . If you missed the first part, it was online yesterday and can be found here , along with a tour-wide giveaway. Although some editors warn Nellie not to become part of the story she’s writing about, she (fortunately) doesn’t listen. How groundbreaking was her approach/style to journalism, not just the fact that she was female? Elizabeth Cochrane (aka Nellie Bly) She may not have been the first undercover journalist, though I’d be hard pressed to name anyone before her. She was certainly the pioneer of the field. And what’s astonishing is how long she was able to carry it off. The Madhouse exposé was just the start of a two-year run of stories with her infiltrating one illegal or immoral situation after another. At the start of the second novel (which I’ve only just begun writing), she foils a serial rapist in Central Park by posing as a potential victim and catching him! So it ...
