Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Review: Inés of My Soul

Inés of My Soul Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book you have to give four stars because it's clearly well-written and a Good Novel, not necessarily because you like it. It wasn't bad, and I definitely liked it - which gives it at least 3 stars according to the Goodreads metric - but I can't say I *really* liked it. It earned that 4th star by virtue of its inherent quality.

"Ines of My Soul" is a fictional biography of a Spanish woman of common birth who becomes a conquistadora of Chile and falls in love with three different men along the way. The story is framed as Ines writing and dictating her memoirs to her daughter. She recounts a partial history of the exploration of South America, as well as a rather detailed history of the founding and growth of Chile. The book is in turns informative and moving. Ines Suarez was a real historical figure, and was present at the founding of Chile (as far as I'm aware), but Allende successfully turns her into a person, a character who loves and is scorned and loves again, and who fiercely cares for the bedraggled settlers of Chile.

The prose is lovely and introspective, and especially beautiful when describing the landscape of Chile or Ines's various loves throughout her life. I'm not big on the story, but I'll admit that the historical fictional biography is not really my thing. I'd go so far as to say there isn't really a story, in terms of exposition-rising action-falling action structure; it's just a narrative of events as they happened, and even then Ines tells us straight up when major characters are going to die way before it happens, which eliminates any potential for tension in the story. But that kind of tension isn't the point; this is the kind of novel that luxuriates in the moment and the telling. For me, the telling isn't *quite* beautiful enough to pay off, but I imagine for a lot of people it does.

Personally, I am slightly bothered by Ines's occasional (but inconsistent) emphasis on how poorly the Spaniards treated the Indians and how it was wrong and cruel. It doesn't feel true to character - because it's only occasional, and because it seems rather convenient that the main character of the novel (sometimes) has these modern sensibilities about cruelty to the indigenous peoples - and instead feels more like modern moralizing. Perhaps we're supposed to read it as the narrator Ines trying to make herself look better in hindsight; several of her comments have this "well *they* treated their slaves badly but *I* didn't" feel to them, so it may be that. But it definitely came across, to me, as a distinctly 20th/21st century sense of morality forced into a context where it didn't fit to make the book more palatable to readers, who don't want to read about a good strong woman who also happens to be a slave torturer. (Granted, I also don't know anything about the real-life Ines Suarez outside this book, so maybe she did do all those things. I somehow doubt it though.)

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