Pablo Neruda Saved Thousands of War Refugees. Isabel Allende Imagines Two of Them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/books/review/a-long-petal-of-the-sea-isabel-allende.html

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A LONG PETAL OF THE SEABy Isabel Allende

In January of 1939, after three and a half years of devastating civil war, Francisco Franco defeated Spain’s Republican army at Barcelona, clinching a dictatorship that would last for nearly a half-century and displacing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, activists and Republican supporters. Many fled across the Pyrenees into France thinking they’d escaped the worst, only to find themselves behind barbed wire in concentration camps like Argèles-sur-Mer, “half-dead from cold and hunger.”

Though the larger world seemed as blind to Spain’s displaced population as they’d been to the war itself, the Chilean diplomat and poet Pablo Neruda lobbied to save over 2,000 of the refugees, as many as could fit on a nine-ton cargo ship called the Winnipeg, bound for political asylum. Neruda’s far-reaching humanist act calls to mind Oskar Schindler, and is the little-known kernel of history at the heart of Isabel Allende’s 17th novel, “A Long Petal of the Sea.” Allende, we learn from her author’s note, first heard about Neruda’s “ship of hope” in her childhood, when it caught in her memory and remained there for 40 years. Now she has deftly woven fact and fiction, history and memory, to create one of the most richly imagined portrayals of the Spanish Civil War to date, and one of the strongest and most affecting works in her long career.

Spanning generations and continents, the novel follows an unforgettable pair of exiles granted passage on the Winnipeg: Victor Dalmau, an auxiliary medic in the war, and Roser Bruguera, a young woman carrying the child of Victor’s brother Guillem, missing in action. As the special consul for Spanish emigration, Neruda has been ordered to select candidates clinically, rejecting radicals and any candidates who are overly political or intellectual. His compassion becomes the stronger factor, however, an unexpected blessing for Victor and Roser, who manage to impress the poet with their selflessness and commitment to save the child at any cost.

[ Read an excerpt from “A Long Petal of the Sea.” ]

Victor and Roser marry, a bond that has nothing to do with romantic love, but something far richer and more reliable. As they begin their lives over again with nothing in Santiago, Chile, their partnership grows into deep friendship and emotional symbiosis. Only together, they realize, can they endure what they’ve lost and recover a sense of purpose.

The notions of love and belonging are satisfyingly complex in the novel, where intimate connections are challenged as countries tumble toward fratricidal conflict and upheaval. Like Spain, Chile will ultimately be fractured by dictatorship, sending Neruda into hiding abroad. Victor and Roser will become exiles yet again, as the idea of home becomes thornier and more remote.

Allende herself is no stranger to exile. Driven from Chile to Venezuela in the 1970s, during the reign of Augusto Pinochet when her name appeared on “wanted” lists, she lived in Venezuela for 13 years to survive. It was there that she began writing “The House of Spirits,” her debut novel and perhaps her best-known work of fiction. Without that displacement, Allende has said, she might never have become a writer.

Civil war can be “a hurricane that destroys a lot in its path,” as one of the characters tells us. But it can also be a powerful force of transformation — both for individuals and for nations. Allende’s personal experience may have served to broaden her perspective and sensitivity when it comes to complex politics and ideologies. Either way, she shows a deft hand and tremendous poise here, creating a story that feels true as well as consequential.

In “A Long Petal of the Sea,” as in much of Allende’s fiction, there is the sense that every human life is an odyssey, and that how and where we connect creates the fabric of our existence: the source of our humanity. If what happens to us — the axis of our fate — is nearly always beyond our control, stubbornly unchangeable, we can still choose what we cleave to and fight for, refusing to be vanquished. This is true belonging, and how we build a world.