October 28, 2013

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I’ve been reading Isabel Allende’s Inés of My Soul, a fictionalized telling of the beginnings of Chile from the perspective of a woman of no prospects in Spain who ends up as “gobernadora,” as well as founder of Santiago and many of its institutions. On page 124 (with another 175+ to go) she says:

…what these men suffered in Los Chunchos  under the hot, torrential rains and clouds of mosquitoes: sick and hungry, they had walked through swamps and been chased by savages who ate one another when they failed to catch a Spaniard. (Am I the only reader who thinks that statement is a bit glib?)
            …the man who commanded this detachment…was a tall, very handsome man, with a broad brow, aquiline nose, and brown eyes that were large and liquid, like those of a horse. (Are you as bored by this description as I am? At best it says Inés is in love with him, but it sounds like too many romance writers trying to induce their readers to project their love for an idealized mate on the hero.) … Although he was younger than the other renowned military men in the group, they had chosen him captain of captains because of his courage and intelligence. His name was Rodrigo de Quiroga. Nine years later, he would be my husband.

Why is she telling us this? Amid the skirmishes with native Chileans, the lust for gold of the Spaniards, the abuse of the Indians by Spaniards and blacks as they cross the desert from Peru, and the building of the new city through the next dozens of pages, he is barely mentioned a half dozen times. This while Inés is still the mistress of the leader of the conquering expedition whom she is ravenously in love (or perhaps lust) with. At best it says to the reader: take note every time I mention his name – it will matter later. I don’t think this enhances the story. She would do better to build his distinctive qualities into each of the half dozen times he is mentioned – then I would begin to take not of him as a character worthy of my attention. I would become as enticed by him as Inés is when she writes about him forty years after this scene.

This is a novel of territory and names foreign to the reader. It is hard enough to distinguish between Valdivia and Villagra. To add an extensive cast of characters who are all fighting Indians indiscriminately would be better handled by attributing the action of several true characters to a single one and simplifying the cast. Maybe this is hard when conveying a well-researched history. But my attitude is that if you’re writing fiction, you have a certain license to express the depth and breadth of the story without unnecessary characters for the reader to track.

Advice to writers: don’t use names for different characters that start with the same letter or are in any way similar, for example, rhyming: unless the characters are strikingly distinctive in position or action, the fast reader will confuse Simmons and Timmons, Harry and Barry. I recently edited a novel of east Indian immigrants. The author had included seven minor characters with the initial “A.” Since all the names were unusual to the American reader, they would blur together in their infrequent appearance.

I want to alert the reader to something I learned from reading Isabel Allende’s memoir The Sum of Our Days: She does not write in English. Everything I’ve read has been a translation!

While I’m disappointed (I loved Eva Luna), it allows me to forgive her when her writing is not very good. As to this memoir – and the quote above – her translator’s style can be quite pedestrian. But I also found this memoir to have been slapped together indiscriminately – tedious in places and including stories that were neither distinctive to her life nor added to the formation of her character – which are qualities of memoir that I value, along with musing on the world and experiences that formed the character, as well as how the character took shape through conscious effort.

I had planned to show examples of foretelling in non-fiction that don’t work, but I’ll save that for another time since I was distracted by writing about other points in Allende’s writing.

In the meantime, delight in the process.

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