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A Long Petal of the Sea is the twenty-third novel from Isabel Allende, whose prolific career has spanned across decades and continents. The same can be said of her most recent novel, which begins with the Spanish Civil War, and follows the mass exodus of Spanish citizens fleeing from Franco’s fascist forces to the Americas and other European nations. This novel specifically follows Victor Dalmau, a skilled doctor for the Spanish Republican army, and his young wife Roser, his brother’s widow who is pregnant with his brother’s child. Victor and Roser enter into a marriage of convenience, and together board a ship, The Winnipeg, which was commandeered by the poet Pablo Neruda to transport Spanish citizens in political exile to Chile.
The novel traces Victor and Roser’s lives in Chile, including the birth of Roser’s son Marcel, and the family’s yearning for their home nation of Spain. In Chile, Victor finishes his medical degree while Roser further explores her prodigious musical talents, as the two begin to build a life together in a nation that gradually becomes their home. The other characters that enter the narrative in Chile include the del Solars, a bourgeois family who take in the Dalmaus when they first arrive in Chile. The del Solar family exemplifies the generational differences in political ideologies that existed in Chile: the patriarch is a conservative Catholic whose children are more free spirited socialists.
The novel is remarkably broad in scope, not just in terms of the breadth of the characters lives, but also in terms of their political landscape. It begins with Franco’s rule in Spain and continues through the democratic elections in Chile that installed a socialist president, and the subsequent political turmoil that allowed Pinochet and his militant fascists overtake the Chilean government. The novel is about the inevitable waves of peace and war that exist within a lifetime, most exhibited by Victor’s arc as a political prisoner in Spain, to a successful doctor in Chile, and then again his brief imprisonment that results from his brief alliance with the deposed Chilean socialist leaders.
While political turmoil is certainly a central fact of the novel, it must also be noted that the theme running alongside violence is love. It is a gradual love story between Victor and Roser, whose initial commitment to each other blossoms into a true romance in their later days. This novel is centered on the concept of love free from judgment, as even if Victor and Roser had strayed from each other in their youth, the love that they share is without reproach. Allende crafts the narrative around this central theme of love and commitment as a transcendence of suffering, as thus has written an essential novel for our time, one that lyrically emphasizes love in the face of chaos.