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 very difficult to write some quality historical prose and even more difficult to set it in a foreign country, as it demands tons of research into the subject but Dinah Jefferies seems to be very hard-working in this aspect. I had some novels that I failed to finish, as throughout the text they felt awfully off-key with the period and the culture they described, but here I knew at once that the author knows what she is writing about. The setting is colonized Ceylon (presently Sri-Lanka) at the beginning of the 20 th century . From the very beginning the reader can feel that the author is in love with this country (the fact that she willingly admits in the postface telling about her childhood year spent in Malaya very similar in culture and wildlife and her trip to Sri-Lanka while writing the book). The novel vividly describes Sri-Lankan wildlife and people touching upon several cultural milestones. Anyway Sri-Lanka is not the main topic of the novel. This book is about pre...

It is always not so simple to discuss gender issues and it seems that while mass media has learned to speak about it openly long ago, the literature since Medieval times has been too conservative to do so , preferring either to use euphemisms to describe everything that doesn’t correspond to the standard female-male relations, or, as in case with religious literature, blame all diversities, or rather not speak about them at all. The truth is, however, that human personality (as well as human body) is too complicated to fit into any binary system and, whether we want it or not, we have to accept the variety of ways it can be expressed in. Jeffrey Eugenides gives the issue a brand new approach. He takes a traditional and long-existing genre of family saga and turns it into narration of all sides of family life which we all know to exist but never dare to speak about. He shows that relations within the family and self-identification are not always what we presume they should be...

"And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the East of Eden" There is so much about this book that it is really hard to find appropriate words to speak about it. This is one of those books which make you live through a whole new life while you are reading it. Three generations of people, fifty five years and hundreds of events appear before your eyes, evil and good, virtue and vice, love and hatred, happiness and sadness - there is everything life can bring to you and having read the novel you feel that whatever it brings it is wonderful and worth living. Though the places and people described in the book are all very different, East of Eden deals mostly with the life of small town America. Steinbeck doesn't idealize this life, he shows both sides of it - religious meetings and brothels, poor farmers and rich businessmen, conservative people and those who are not afraid to look into the future. All this gives a very good and d...