VIOLETA by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury £16.99, 336pp)

VIOLETA Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury £16.99, 336pp) 

VIOLETA

by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury £16.99, 336pp)  

The history of 20th century Latin America, well, some of it, is crammed into Isabel Allende’s breathless new novel, which is narrated by the 100-year-old Violeta, born during the Spanish flu pandemic in an unnamed South American country.

The Great Depression sees off her father’s fortune (and him), and Violeta grows into a strong-willed woman with a keen nose for business — and a decades- long infatuation with the recklessly glamorous, commitment-phobe Julian, a politically shady drug-runner and pilot who becomes involved with the CIA.

There’s extreme drama at nearly every turn, with the continent itself lurching murderously between communism and fascism in the background.

Told in the form of a deathbed letter to Violeta’s grandson, this breakneck novel is loosely about the extent to which a life is at the mercy of history, but Allende’s famed storytelling technique lets her down: so much happens that you can barely see the wood, let alone poor Violeta.  

WAYWARD by Dana Spiotta (Virago £14.99, 288pp)

Wayward by Dana Spiotta (Virago £14.99, 288pp) 

WAYWARD

by Dana Spiotta (Virago £14.99, 288pp) 

While the midlife crisis novel remains a popular choice for male writers, Dana Spiotta has made it available to women. This aggressively self aware book, which bears Dana Spiotta’s wild rhythms and seems to be a mirror of the menopausal unhinging nature, is a welcome addition.

Sam, 53, is a divorced mother who suffers from persistent night sweats and fury. Sam spies an abandoned Arts and Crafts house downtown Syracuse and immediately purchases it.

She still can’t sleep, though, and in her febrile, psychologically ambushed state, starts spending more time online, hooking up with internet communities offering virtue-signalling resistance in an America polarised by Trump, MeToo and BLM.

Meanwhile, her mother is dying and her teenage daughter has hooked up with an older architect who turns Syracuse’s dilapidated buildings into bachelor pads for minted ‘bros’.

Everything feels deliriously untethered in this wayward novel — Sam, history, plot, America itself.

I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverrun £16.99, 352pp)

I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverrun £16.99, 352pp) 

I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS 

by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverrun £16.99, 352pp) 

Apart from the title, which must count as one of the worst ever, Claire Vaye Watkins’ latest novel is remarkable for recycling an autobiography that includes a father who used to hang out with Charles Manson.

This ghost is just one of the many haunting Claire, her narrator. Claire has been a writer for over ten years and left her husband in Michigan with her baby girl to go to Reno to give a reading. She then never returns home. She instead embarks on an adventure through the desert, accompanied by both real and figurative spectres from her past which includes 2 dead parents and several dead boyfriends.

Watkins’ surreal auto-fiction favours a fever-dream style narrative that variously combines the stories of her parents (her mother was an artist who died from OxyContin addiction) with her own struggles with motherhood.

This novel has been raved about for detonating many of the myths about motherhood in electric prose but I found myself frequently lost within its stream-of-consciousness style drift. 

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