ustxtxb_obs_1987_07_31_50_00020-00000_000.pdf

by Robert Flynn TEXAS LITERARY AWARD for Fiction \(Southwestern Booksellers Assn. At bookstores, or from CORONA PUBLISHING CO. San Antonio, Texas 78210 Our 10th year of publishing. –714 Representing all types of properties In Austin and Central Texas Interesting & unusual property a specialty. 477-3651 N01 and Associates E 1117 West 5th Street Austin, Texas 78703 REALTOR “‘ ANDERSON& COMPANY’ COFFEE TEA SPICES ‘Iwo JEFFERSON /WARE AUSTIN, TEXAS W/31 512 458-1533 Send me your list. Name Street City Zip Some things you must never stop refusing to bear injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. William Faulkner ISABEL ALLENDE, with her second novel in as many years, continues to prove herself as one of the preeminent literary figures in the Americas, not only in technique but in her haunting skill to explore the good and evil in the human soul. Her 1985 novel, The House of the Spirits, was a tour de force of “magic realism,” a tale both supernatural and real telling of three generations of a Latin-American family, the Truebas, against a backdrop of a bloody military coup. It was a powerful and eloquent work. Of Love and Shadows is a more direct account of the political awakening of an James C. Harrington is the legal director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union. ANSWER ING eetvat, edit SER VICE KATHLEEN O’CONNELL P.O. BOX 3005 477-8278 AUS11N, TX 78764 C-A Walk on the Beach, A Breath of Fresh Air, A Discovery of A Shell, And Yourself .. . P.O. Box 8 Port Aransas, TX 78373 upper-class reporter, Irene Beltran, who falls in love with Francisco Leal, a photographer for her woman’s magazine, and who falls out of love with her childhood fiance, now a ranking military officer. OF LOVE AND SHADOWS By Isabel Allende Translated by Margaret Sayers Pedan New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987 $17.95 Irene Beltran’s conscientizacion takes place in a brutal dictatorship, which is Chile. Until she met Francisco Leal, a child of leftist exiles from Franco’s Spain, Beltran was apolitical and untouched by the regime. Leal’s family, however, is deeply enmeshed in resisting the dictatorship. His father, a teacher, published anti-government tracts; and his brother, a priest, is deeply involved in the Church’s struggle against the government’s on-going massacre of its opposition, principally the poor afflicted by military injustice. Beltran’s path toward near assassination flows directly from the same personal compassion and charity that she exhibits toward the senile patients of the convalescent home that she and her equally apolitical aunt operate. SEASONAL RAIN Francisco draws Irene into his world and into his heart as they investigate the disappearance of a young campesina, who, while suffering daily seizures at noon \(which her townsfolk thought near of a military commander who happens upon the scene with his men. The officer later returns and drags away the young girl, who is never seen again. In eventually solving the campesina’s disappearance through clues gleaned from guilt-ridden lower echelon officers, Irene and Francisco discover and, through the adroit intervention of the archbishop, shake the country with a tale of horror about others who have been brutally murdered and buried in an abandoned mine. Allende’s development of character and plot is mesmerizing, compelling the reader through the book. Her portrayal of the deepening love and sense of mission between Irene and Francisco is both tender and forceful. They knowingly risk death on a journey toward eventual exile. Most telling of all, especially to people acquainted with the day-to-day agony under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, is Allende’s ability to capture the totality of the government’s brutality and repression. Allende does this deftly through her narrative’s detail. She develops the scenario well, touching, for example, on the privileged life and medical care afforded the military, the destruction of agrarian reform, and the blacklisting of union members from steady employment. Allende’s novel must be read not only because it is strikingly good literature but because it explains the suffering of those not fortunate enough to live in a democracy, however imperfect. In the Shadow of the Dictator By James C. Harrington 20 JULY 31, 1987