But the book shines when she gives voice to the slow burn of mature love.Īllende’s work can rely too heavily on stereotypes, substituting culture as a shorthand for character. “She missed sex, romance, and love” and “had gotten beyond any enthusiasm for fleeting adventures.” Her eye is set on Richard, but thus far he’s been cold.Īllende’s characters’ lives are marked by tragedy - fate seems to have dealt them more than their fair share of darkness. Lucia was “crushed by the weight of the familiar” in her previous life, in Chile. She is most at ease when describing the august romance that blooms between Richard and Lucia. When she appears at Richard’s home that evening and tells him and his tenant, Lucia Maraz, what she has in her trunk, their three lives become “inextricably linked.”Įach of Allende’s sentences curls into the next like a delicate arabesque.
The woman, Evelyn Ortega, an undocumented Guatemalan worker, takes off in a panic. In Isabel Allende’s “In the Midst of Winter,” Richard Bowmaster, a 60-year-old professor, rear-ends a young woman in a Lexus. In the midst of winter, in the midst of their singular struggles, three people are brought together by a car accident during a Brooklyn snowstorm.
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