Beyond the Letters

Isabelle Allende is extremely good at family sagas. So good, that she makes her reader live a whole new life while reading a novel, and by the end of it you feel as if you started ages ago even if you read it in one day. It took me more than one day to read “A Long Petal of the Sea” but believe me, if I hadn’t had to go to work and do my house chores, I wouldn’t have put it away until I was done. The story is very engaging, emotional, captivating, it grabs you to never let go. The plot is simple and complicated at the same time. While the author is focused mainly on two protagonists, throughout the book you meet a range of other people and other stories which are none the less important and meaningful. It’s a family saga on the one hand and a master’s painting of the whole century on the other. It starts off in the midst of the Spanish Civil war where a medical student Victor Dalmau is trying to save as many lives as he can and a young pianist Roser is equally in love with music ...

It’s is difficult to evaluate a book which tells about a culture so different from your own, and it’s even more difficult to review it, but nevertheless, I decided to try. I have struggled to read Asian authors for the last two years and each time I picked a book and started reading, I had real troubles analyzing the text as the symbolism and inner meanings were indecipherable to me due to the lack of appropriate cultural background. This novel written by an American author turned out to be an encyclopedia of Chinese culture and answered a lot of questions that have previously arisen, so now I’m much more prepared to read something by a Chinese writer. Lisa See has done a profound research preparing to write this novel and I really appreciated that, for this text managed to preserve Chinese symbols and cultural peculiarities but present them in a way understandable to a western reader. “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” gives you an insight into the life of Chinese women in...

Having read some reviews, I realized, to my surprise, that many people blame this novel for exessive intertexuality (which is the basis of all postmodern literature, by the way). Indeed, some believe that this postmodern feature comes from some kind of literature crisis and shows the inabily of modern authors to produce anything genuine and original (therefore such desire to quote and interpret the classics). But if we think about it carefully we'll find out that throughout the history literary texts were always connected with and influenced by each other. Many authors of Renaissance borrowed their plots from the works of ancient Greeks and Romans, while the Romanticists took inspiration in folklore fables and fairy tales. As for me, even if Mr. Pip IS a compilation of already knows classic pieces, it is surely a very clever one. So if we focus on something positive a reader can take from this book, what shall that be? Firstly, there is  a small secluded island in the Pacific ...