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 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...