“MAYA’S NOTEBOOK” by
Isabel Allende (Fourth Estate / Harper-Collins, $NZ34:99)
Getting the
narrative voice right is one of the most exacting things a novelist can
achieve. A narrator who is too obviously the author’s mouthpiece lacks
credibility, but then so does a narrator who sits incongruously with the life
he or she is supposed to have led.
Isabel Allende’s latest novel Maya’s Notebook (translated from the
Spanish by Anne McLean) suffers very badly from an incongruous narrative voice.
The novel is very busy with plot - improbably so in places – and quite heavy on
social comment. But no matter how interesting much of this may be, Maya’s Notebook flounders with a
first-person narrative voice just this side of risible. And, though it may seem
blasphemous to say this of the Spanish language’s all-time best-selling
novelist, much of what Allende has to say is insufferably pat.
Kindly let me explain by way of
plot.
Chief protagonist and narrator is
19-year-old Maya Vidal. She has no mother. Her philandering father was married
only long enough for her to be born, before her mother gave her up and took
off. So Maya has been brought up by her loving Chilean alternative-lifestyler
grandmother Nidia – “Nini” – and her equally loving mixed-race astronomer
grandfather “Popo”. Her ineffectual father looks in occasionally.
Nini was a refugee from
Pinochet’s Chile and has settled in the United States. So Maya has grown up a
Californian, attending Berkeley High. But she has got badly into trouble with
the law and with various nasty people. To shield her from harm and perhaps
protect her from herself (and post-Pinochet Chile being a democracy once more),
her grandmother has arranged for her to go and live on Chiloe Island, one of a
group off the southern coast of Chile. Her host there is old Manuel Arias, a
former dissident against the Pinochet dictatorship. Maya takes her notebook, in
which the story is supposedly being written.
So we have a double-barrelled
novel.
Maya gives an account of her life
among the variously remote and quaint and healthy Chilean islanders, whose
values and customs at first contrast so strongly with her Californese. She also
chronicles her relationship with old Manuel. The novel is divided into the four
seasons of her sojourn.
But her account alternates with
memories of how she got into all her trouble in the first place; and this is
where the voice narrating the novel is so completely at odds with the person
she is supposed to be. For, without throwing too many “spoilers” at you, I can
tell you that Maya got involved heavily in drugs while at high school; fed her
habit by being part of a gang that extorted money out of paedophiles; was sent
to a rehab facility in remotest Oregon; escaped; was kidnapped and raped by a
truck-driver; wound up in Las Vegas where she became a courier for an abusive
drug-peddler; got hooked badly on the stuff herself and almost died of it; and
finally stumbled on a big-time gangster counterfeiting operation, the gangsters
being the main people from whom she is fleeing.
I do not for one moment believe a
recovering junkie and traumatised rape victim would speak with the perky,
confident, no-nonsense, matter-of-fact voice that Maya uses. This is the
novel’s central absurdity. Indeed it nullifies what I assume was intended to be
the horrific effect of the novel’s more sordid episodes, because the young
woman who suffers all these indignities is – if the tone of her voice is to be
trusted – completely unaffected by them.
I am not complaining about an unreliable narrator here.
Unreliable narrators are almost standard operational procedure in modern
novels. I am complaining about a totally improbable
narrator. True, Isabel Allende tells us that Maya comes from a well-read family
who dabble in high culture. But this does not cover the yawning gap between
Maya’s experience and the voice with which she speaks.
Early on, Allende tries to paper
the gap by having Maya say:
“Writing
is like riding a bicycle: you don’t forget how, even if you go for years
without doing it. I’m trying to go in chronological order, since some sort of
order is required and I thought that would make it easy, but I lose my thread,
I go off on tangents or I remember something important several pages later and
there’s no way to fit it in. My memory goes in circles, spirals and somersaults”
(p.4)
But this explains only the
novel’s back-and-forth revelation of Maya’s earlier life. It does not explain
the voice itself. Indeed, we soon realize that when she chooses, Allende simply
has Maya conveying information journalistically, as Allende herself would have
done had she been writing in the third-person.
Take the travelogue of the
following:
“In Chiloe the salmon-farming industry was the second-largest in the
world, after Norway’s, and boosted the region’s economy, but it contaminated
the seabed, put the traditional fishermen out of business, and tore families
apart. Now the industry is ruined, Manuel explained, because they put too many
fish in the cages and gave them so many antibiotics that when they were
attacked by a virus, they couldn’t be saved; their immune systems didn’t work
anymore. There are twenty thousand unemployed from the salmon farms, most of
them women” (p.30).
The sum effect of this disjunction
is to turn the novel into something perilously close to “chick-lit”. Maya sees
the sordid side of life then (without bearing any scars) is miraculously
redeemed by immersion in a purer society than the one she left behind.
Which brings me to the ‘insufferably
pat’ side of the novel. Maya’s Notebook
far too easily and neatly contrasts rough, sordid USA with redeeming, quaint
Chiloe. It is true that Allende has Maya make some wry comments about how
tourists are deceived into thinking that in going to Chiloe they are meeting
the unsullied, pristine past. Take this amusing account of eco-tourists’
delusions:
“People travel to Chiloe with the idea of going back in time, and they
can be disappointed by the cities on Isla Grande, but on our little island they
find what they’re looking for. There is no intention to deceive them on our
part, of course; nevertheless, on curanto days oxen and sheep appear by
chance near the beach, there are more than the usual number of nets and boats
drying on the sand, people wear their coarsest hats and ponchos, and nobody
would think of using their cell phone in public.”(pp.59-60)
It is true, too, that later in
the novel there are some comments on domestic violence on the remote islands,
and some ironies about local superstitions. Even so, the arc of the story
suggests too easy a curing of the soul by withdrawal from corrupt modernity.
That is signalled near midway point with such fol-de-rol as:
“In the academy I was my very own Russian novel; I was bad, impure, and
damaging. I disappointed and hurt those who loved me, my life was fucked up. On
this island, however, I feel good almost all the time, as if by changing the
scenery I’d also changed my skin.” (p.126)
And if that idyll isn’t enough to
show you that Allende thinks in terms of some sort of unrealistic magic, then
consider Maya’s involvement in a coven of benign white witches, who act out
healing rituals. Maya says:
“The ceremony of women in the womb of Pachamama connected me
definitively with this fantastic Chiloe and, in some strange way, with my own
body. Last year I led an undermined existence, thinking my life was over and my
body irredeemably stained. Now I’m whole, and I feel a respect for my body that
I never felt before, when I used to spend my time examining myself in the
mirror to count up all my defects. I like myself as I am and don’t want to
change anything. On this blessed island nothing feeds my bad memories….”
(p.184)
Sorry. I believe none of this. It
is soft-feminist daydream.
Did I enjoy anything in this
book?
I suppose there are some
interesting sidelights on Chile.
As is well known, Isabel Allende
is related to the socialist President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown and
died in the coup that brought Pinochet’s dictatorship to power. (She is neither
Allende’s daughter nor his niece, as some people seem to believe – she is his
second cousin. Her father was the president’s cousin). Of course she looks with
horror on the coup that overthrew Allende. In Maya’s Notebook, one strand of plot gradually reveals one
character’s experiences during the years of repression.
What I found most interesting,
however, was the implicit tone of forgiveness in this novel – the rich
landowner who benefitted from Pinochet’s rule is depicted as an essentially decent
man, only slowly realizing his errors of judgement. Likewise, while there are
some jabs at the church and its teachings, one of the novel’s sympathetic
characters is the liberation-theology priest Luciano Lyon and there is clear
acknowledgment that the church largely stood against Pinochet. I think Isabel
Allende aims for reconciliation rather than bitter memory. And I wonder if her
depiction of a sordid, criminal-ridden USA isn’t a way of saying that Chile’s
own violent past has to be seen in balance with the evils of other countries.
Having said all that, though, the
novel’s improbably neat ending, the unbelievable narrator and the glib
schematisation of the story made it difficult for me to accept it as something
for grown-ups. Possibly its event-filled plot would go down best with teenage
girls, such as the narrator is meant to be.
Odd Final Comment: Having read this novel, I searched the ‘net for
reviews thereof. I was interested to find that New Zealander Emily Perkins
reviewed it for the Guardian in
England, and I felt reassured that she, like me, was troubled by the narrator,
although she was a little more polite about it than I have been here. At one
stage Perkins remarks: “The effect is a
bit like taking a bus tour through the desperate parts of Las Vegas, a guide
delivering facts about life on the streets. You see a mugging through the
window, but the bus has moved on.” Yes. Quite.
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