The Nature of Things

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende My rating: 5 of 5 stars I've long been a fan of Isabel Allende's inspiring fiction. Her soul-baring stories most often feature female protagonists and are told through multigenerational family sagas. She continues that tradition with The Japanese Lover . Allende's method is to tell her story through the voice of the all-knowing third person narrator, but, although the narrator may know all, it is revealed to us very slowly, as one after another of the narrative's layers is peeled away. Her style of writing is deceptively simple and unadorned. At least, that is the feeling that I get reading the books in translation. One has to acknowledge that this may be at least in part attributable to the art of the translator, in this case two translators, Mike Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. In The Japanese Lover , all the major characters are guarding secrets that are considered shameful at the time. In the course of the novel, all of those secr...

Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende My rating: 3 of 5 stars We meet Maya Nidal when she is nineteen years old. She is a drug and alcohol addict, with rainbow-colored hair and a nose ring, on the road to self-destruction. We learn that for the first fifteen years of her life, Maya lived an idyllic existence. Not that there weren't problems. One being parental abandonment. When Maya was only weeks old, her Danish mother delivered her to her in-laws, Maya's grandparents, and left the country never to return. She relinquished all parental rights. Meanwhile, Maya's father was an airline pilot, constantly in the air. He was the definition of an absentee parent. But her grandparents, her Nini and her beloved Popo, were very much present. They raised her in a wonderful home in Berkeley, where she was surrounded by love and opportunity to fulfill her potential. Her Popo was the steadfast anchor and the moral center of her life. As a child, she begged him to promise her that he wo...