Isabel Allende's VIOLETA (tr by Francis Riddle)

It's not hard to make me cry these days -- one of the many reasons I've pretty much stopped watching television is that I bawl uncontrollably, even at commercials, so we won't even talk about sporting events or scripted dramas like Call the Midwife.* Or, say, The Expanse, which, we all know the last time a book made me cry; it wasn't that long ago, was it?

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don't notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives. That's what happened to me the day I recovered Torito's cross.

So it should come as no surprise that I've spent the last few days peering at my ebook reader through a film of tears, because I've been reading Isabel Allende, a writer whom I haven't read since I had to read her debut novel for a class in college, long before my cry-at-everything problem surfaced in my life, but yeah, I cried then, too. So I should have been prepared for Violeta.

The passage I quoted above occurs quite late in the novel and wasn't the first bit that elicited the waterworks, but it's the most important to the plot, so I'm going to talk about it and yeah, you guys don't pay attention to the tagline on this blog anymore so spoilers except, of course, this being historical fiction, history itself is the greatest spoiler of them all.

The title character, Violeta, is a member of the same clan readers first encountered in Allende's first novel House of the Spirits(which I read for a class in college when it was still pretty new), whose life spans an entire century in her native land (a never-named Chile but come on, it's obviously Chile) with excursions to the United States and to Europe over the course of an extraordinary life that begins in the Great Depression with her family's fall from upper class splendor to living off the charity of the kindly back-of-beyond family of Violete's governess' lover Teresa, continues through a tepid marriage to a German veterinarian that brings her within a whisker of getting involved in a fictionalized Colonia Dignidad, a scorching love affair with a dashing criminal pilot with ties to all of the right-wing evil that South America and the United States have to offer (and it is he who fathers her two children and madly complicates her life for decades while she is still technically married to the German), a nice one with the guy whom she originally meets when her criminal lover hires him to keep track of their wayward daughter in 1960s Las Vegas, and finally a delightful autumnal relationship with a Norwegian diplomat and bird watcher.

The love of her life, though, as we are told early on, is someone named Camilio, whose actual relationship to her is kept secret until quite late; two other men loom large and protective and helpful in her life in the form of her brother, Jose Antonio, and the Torito mentioned in the passage I quoted above. Her brother shares his business acumen with her early on in life, allowing her to develop a powerful skill set that lets her support herself as an independent woman in a time and place when that was a unicorn; Torito is a family retainer whom she has always known, something of a father figure, not conventionally intelligent or intellecutal and huge, so commonly thought of as developmentally disabled (the novel uses the R word), who comes through for her at a desperate time and pays the ultimate price for it.

I have defined Violeta so far through her relationships with men, but there are also incredible women in her life, starting with her Irish governess, who comes to her as a nanny dressed like a flapper in the 1920s, young and pretty but already damaged by a devastating past as an orphan girl in Ireland but determined not to let that stop her; her relationship with another woman, the aforementioned Teresa, not only governs the early course of Violeta's life as the source of her family's refuge after their fall in the Great Depression, but also involves them all in radical politics from the movement for women's suffrage through the election of Chile's first Socialist president and the sweeping reforms that were utimately his downfall.

In addition to the governess are two extraordinary maiden aunts, a pair of itinerant schoolteachers who train up Violeta to maybe someday join their ranks, a cook who becomes her family's link to the indigenous population in the south of the nation, and so many more. If a character gets a name, they get a full story, relayed in intimate, chatty detail by narrator Violeta, who is recounting the whole of her life  and her evolution from spoiled only daughter of a rich family to wayward wife of a German immigrant to conservative, self-supporting savvy businesswoman to radical founder of a social justice organization that looks poised to outlive her -- all for the benefit of her beloved Camilio.

All this means that, yes, Violeta lives through the brutal military dictatorship led by Pinochet. At first she doesn't think it's going to be so bad -- she has thriving businesses, plenty of money, and government contracts that look like they're going to be honored -- and her awakening to the actual nature of the right-wing dictatorship that takes over her country, the finding of a wooden cruxifix she carved as a little girl for her big, strange friend Torito, is sudden, shocking and emotionally wrenching -- and absolutely organic. Allende was great back in the 1980s and has only gotten better, so fluid and natural now that I don't even notice her, which I can also say for translator Francis Riddle.

I mean it as a tremendous compliment to observe that I didn't notice either of them as I was absorbed completely into the story. And crying.

*To name a show that all of the women in my life love passionately and honestly, I don't know how they do it. Every damned episode I've seen has left me sobbing uncontrollably for, like, days? And I have enough to cry about in real life? But there you go. God damn that show.