After the collapse of Republican resistance to Franco's nationalist forces in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled the country and the violent repression that was to follow. Many eventually found their way from Europe to Latin America, a natural place of refuge for Spanish speakers seeking a new life.
Some of those found their way to Chile, the "long petal of sea and white and snow" as beautifully described by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the inspiration for the title of Isabel Allende's magnificant novel of love, suffering, survival and political upheaval.
Neruda plays a small but pivotal role in the novel, which depicts his involvement in the organization of the refugee ship SS Winnipeg, which took Spanish refugees from Bordeaux to Chile in September 1939. A Long Petal of the Sea tells the story of two Catalans among those 2,200 refugees: war widow Roser and her army doctor brother, Victor Dalmau. Allende charts first their war story and then their attempts to rebuild their lives in Santiago and through to the 1973 coup that deposed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende (the author's uncle) and unleashed a wave of repression, killings and disappearances similar to that of Franco's Spain.
This is vintage Allende, and for me her most captivating novel since The House of the Spirits, published in another lifetime in 1982. As in that book, Allende captures the sweeping drama of family life with verve, empathy and sometimes painful honesty as she details the inner lives of her characters, their hopes and fears, with intensity and emotion. And as she does so, she also intertwines the personal with the public illustrating the impact - both good and bad - that political change has on our lives, often leaving us at the mercy of events we have no control over.
The summer of 2022 feels like a good time to read a novel that shows history repeating itself in the space of just a handful of decades. It emphasizes how fragile our democracies and our taken-for-granted freedoms really are. Victor Dalmau, a man who dedicates his life to serving others, twice pays a devastating price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time - and on the wrong side.
A Long Petal of the Sea is hugely enjoyable and very sobering at the same time. While it celebrates the endurance of the human spirit and the power of love, it also highlights our capacity for inflicting chaos and pain on ourselves and others. A truly magnificent novel by an important and beautiful writer.