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Violeta was born in 1920 and died a century later. This novel is a long letter to her grandson, telling him about her full and adventurous life in an unnamed South American country. She comes into the world during the first world war and at the start of the Spanish flu epidemic in that area; her father is wealthy and influential, the father of five sons and now a daughter, and a successful business owner.
But some bad business decisions catch up to him, and Violeta and her parents, her mother’s two single sisters, and her Irish nanny must move out of the city and take refuge in a distant settlement with relatives of a friend. Violeta lives there for a long time, in humble conditions, and it is there she marries for the first time, to a German man whose family owns a hotel. She isn’t interested in marriage or the typical life expected of a woman in those days, but she eventually gives in and weds this nice man. Yet it is a rakish pilot who flies missions in and out of the country who finally grabs her attention, and they begin a longtime affair that produces two children.
The story follows Violeta as she navigates her tempestuous love life, raises her children, and works with her older brother in developing some successful business ventures of her own. She lives at times in her home country, both in the village and in the big city, and at times in Florida and other parts of the United States as life events and her children’s needs take her to the West. Her fortunes change, as does her commitment to stand on her own and break off with the dangerous man in her life, as he becomes more deeply entangled in illegal ventures.
Author Isabel Allende tells Goodreads the book was inspired by her own mother, who died in 2018 at age 98.
“My mother was an extraordinary woman who did not have an extraordinary life. When I started writing Violeta, I was imagining what my mother could have been. She was a very good artist and never became the great artist that she could have been because she was the wife of a diplomat. What interested me was the fact that my mother lived almost a century—a very interesting and important century where we had two world wars—and she lived in Chile, where there was the dictatorship. So the goal of the book was, of course, Violeta’s life, but also to address the times that she lived.”
Violeta thus is a sweeping novel about one woman’s life and about the century she lived through. It includes a pandemic, natural disasters, wars, economic upheavals, the drug trade and its devastating effects, and political concerns both in South America and the United States. It provides a little sampling of history. I found it fascinating to look back on the events and social mores of each decade in those places and compelling to have such an intimate first-person account from a woman who experienced her shares of heartaches, joys, love, passion and disappointments.
(For a similar book that chronicles the lives of a family in another part of the world over a century or so, check out Pachinko.)
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes a handful of uses of mild and moderate language and about 10 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes a number of references to affairs or sexual liaisons, the narrator often remembering her intense passion with one man in particular, and several sex scenes that include either a little or a moderate amount of detail. There are a number of brief crude references throughout the book. One character in particular gets addicted to drugs and cannot get away from the life. Violence includes domestic violence, various types of killings, gang/mafia activity and references to attempted rape.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
