“It always comes up in my books because I have been a foreigner all my life, and I don’t feel I belong anywhere. “The theme of displacement is very natural for me,” Allende told The Guardian in 2015. In fact, this sense of not belonging is the recurring core of much of Allende’s fiction, and it situates her identity as a Latin American writer within larger transnational literary traditions.
Allende lives now in California, displaced not only from the physical home of her ancestors, but from the language, history and culture she carries with her. Allende has been a foreigner since her birth, when her parents were Chilean diplomats, and later when she was a political refugee following Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile. Writing a novel of profound displacement can, perhaps, best be done by someone who knows this as her permanent state. The entwined lives of Victor and Roser make up the arc of Allende’s new novel, their loss and rebuilding spanning continents and wars as they cling to each other, each character becoming the only place the other truly belongs. A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel AllendeĪ member of the Republican army, the 23-year-old medical student Victor Dalmau is among the refugees and although he loses track of his mother and brother, presuming them both dead, he finds (and spends the next several decades holding onto) Roser Brughera, the mother of his brother’s son.
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