Translated from the
Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden
Daughter of Fortune
is the story of Eliza Sommers, a Chilean orphan girl of the nineteenth century who
was taken in by an English family living in Chile. Her passions take her far
beyond that home, however, and weave her in and among the lives of other
extraordinary characters, over land and sea, through desire and pain, fueled by
infatuation, stubbornness and an iron constitution. She eventually ends up in
California during the gold rush, and, as in the words of her companion Tao Chi’en,
“It seems that like everyone else in California we found something different
from what we were looking for.”
Eliza’s character is not the only one we come to know in so
much detail. There are many who affect her and are affected by her in turn who
have strong personalities and interesting histories of their own. The back
stories of these characters are rich in detail and bring to life practically
the whole world as it was then. Europe, England, China, and North and South America
formed these people, and, each in its own way, drove them to California. It
hardly feels like it could have been possible for so much well-researched setting
to fit into 400 pages.
I remembered some of the story laid out in this novel even
though it’s been many years (more than 10) since I read it before. There are so
many fascinating details and this is such a well-told story, however, that I
think if I’d remembered every bit of it, I’d still love to read it again and
again. Eliza and the other characters lead wholly interesting lives and, though
those lives occasionally take grand turns resulting from extraordinary bad
luck, misguided decisions and foolish pride, there is a logic to the
progression of the stories that makes them believable to a captive reader.
This is just one of several novels by Isabel Allende that I’ve really enjoyed. (I also like Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, and Zorro.) Like the others, it is a grand adventure story and depends on a heroine (or hero) who can pass on her details to those of us hoping to virtually escape our sofas and armchairs by reading about them. Allende’s novels are big, self-aware stories that recognize their own importance, peopled with admirable (if not always agreeable) characters who can live up to the creation of these stories. Like Eliza in Daughter of Fortune they seem to have experienced “the clear sensation of beginning a new story in which she was both protagonist and narrator.”
I love a big story. And Daughter
of Fortune is a big, lovable story.
A Year of Books I’ve Read Before
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