It is good to get back to reading. To fall in love with words once again, so much so that they give me goose bumps. To become so immersed in the characters that I am a part of them, feel their exhilaration, pain, love and experience every facet of human nature.
I am currently reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and aching to get back to it. Just a few days ago, I finished Of Love and Shadows and am already a fan of Allende. Maybe I will pick up Eva Luna tomorrow – the blurb sounds promising.
Of Love and Shadows (De amor y de sombre) was about well, love in the shadow of military rule in a Latin American country.
Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (which won the Booker) is about a historian Claudia, who is dying of cancer and plots a book on nothing less than the history of the world woven with the story of her life and the love she finds and loses in the desert during the war.
Both writers, Allende and Lively, bring in elements from their own lives into their books. Lively was born in Egypt and in Moon Tiger, Claudia recalls her days in Egypt. It is interesting to read how history is remembered.
Penelope Lively
Allende was a journo and is related to the Chilean president Salvador Allende who was overthrown in a coup, after which she was in exile. In Of Love and Shadows Irene is a journo and the love story is set against the political upheaval in the country. Irene eventually flees the country to save her life with Francisco, carrying in her heart the hope to return.
Isabel Allende
There are many ways to return and to remember one’s history, I suppose.
zennfish 