A Heartrending Tale for Our Times

english version

Well known and adored by millions of readers worldwide, Chilean-American author, Isabel Allende with her 21st novel In the Midst of Winter will please multitudes of her fans and also leave them uneasy. Uneasy because while this novel displays all the Allende hallmarks that made her famous—passages of eloquently expressed ideas, a love story set amid political turmoil, well-drawn characters—fundamentally it lacks cohesive plot tension to hold all the elements together. The novel moves in jumps and starts.

This may be because of the unwieldy structure that cuts across time periods and continents. The clichéd device of hiding a murdered, frozen body in the trunk of a stolen car never achieves the state of noir drama the author may have intended. Rather it undercuts tension and becomes the most slapstick of moments in the novel, as the young, female body lies untended in the trunk of the car while the snow falls. Yet nearby, seemingly oblivious to the corpse, and inside various more or less warmer locales, the three main characters weave and bob around one another telling their stories, until inevitably two of them have furtive sex in clumsily rearranged sleeping bags.

The novel revolves around Evelyn Ortega, a young Guatemalan born, illegal immigrant whose story of escape is harrowing and her story of survival in the United States only slightly less so. Another main character is Lucia Maraz, an older woman, Chilean born who has lived in exile in the United States and Canada for decades. Her work in academia has thrown her and Richard Bowmaster uneasily together. He is her curt landlord, and they work in the same department and university. Richard, a sixty-year-old reclusive man, seems impervious to human empathy as he moves through his almost monastic, stripped down life. Yet he carries the secrets of a disastrous marriage to a passionate Brazilian woman earlier in his life. In their life in Rio de Janiero several devastating family tragedies left him emotionally frozen and insecure.
As the novel unfolds the three are thrown together when, on a frozen and slippery road in Brooklyn, Richard rear ends the car 20-something Evelyn is driving. A minor accident that draws into the novel the murdered body in the trunk of Evelyn’s car. Richard summons Lucia to help with translating Evelyn’s panicked responses. This is where the novel goes off kilter. The events of dealing with the body have none of the power of the three life stories. The protagonists could as easily have been sitting around a campfire sharing their stories.
On the final page of the novel, Richard, in response to a query from Lucia, quotes Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.”

Ultimately this is a novel of the redemptive recording of oral history and also of healing love. The murder subplot is an unnecessary add-on.