PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe deliberate cruelty of the bureaucracies that enforce the separations, and the enduring psychic wounds these ruptures inflict on children, are the novel’s foundation and its psychological backbone. All of the characters in this timely, provocative story carry the weight of painful history, and their lives converge near the end of the book ... Telling a story that is rooted so deeply in political events can be a difficult balancing act; an author walks a fine line between writing immersive fiction and explaining historical and social context. The Wind Knows My Name contains little of the magic that defined Allende’s earlier novels. Instead, she turns her focus to the brutal details of government-sponsored violence and asks her reader to look closely at the devastation. Allende draws a straight line from Nazi Germany to modern-day atrocities — not because the specifics are the same, but because the damage is. As these characters come together in an emotionally satisfying arc, the solution turns out to be the kindness of strangers who become family. That, at least, is the story Allende is telling. In the real world, the solution is to protect the vulnerable by not tearing families apart in the first place — a less dramatic story, but a much preferable reality.
Stacey D'Erasmo
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewA tricky and absorbing tale about crime, punishment and the lies we tell ourselves ... Into [Suzanne\'s] new, lonely life a bomb is dropped, in the form of a beached whale. Seemingly out of nowhere it appears, immense and struggling to survive on the shore. In less capable hands, this beast might feel like a whale of a metaphor, but D’Erasmo commits to its extraordinariness and the specificity of its mammalian distress ... The problem of the whale takes up a lot of real estate in The Complicities. But the novel makes a different, rather remarkable turn in the second section, which homes in on a cast of supporting characters and gives them voice — sort of ... Suzanne seems to loosen her storytelling grip, opening it up to Lydia’s and Sylvia’s perspectives, this wobbly orbit of women around Alan ... Suzanne may appear to be generously allowing some light into the cracks, but really what she’s doing (what we understand her to be doing) is carefully arranging herself to show off her best angle.
Sarah Winman
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a parade of small stories, intimate connections and complex characters whose lives illuminate the tedium and cataclysms of the 20th century ... It’s hard to encompass all that happens in this whopper of a book, partly because it spans four decades (and more than 450 pages), but even more so because much of it is just the stuff of life, suffused with copious dialogue so casual and idiomatic that it almost subverts its own demand for attention ... This is a theme that runs through the novel, and it’s a bold authorial move, insisting upon the transformative power of aesthetics. Winman makes the case over and over again that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and of course it raises the reader’s expectations. If the book itself isn’t transcendent, the scaffolding will not hold ... But the scaffolding, for the most part, does hold (although I could have done without the talking parrot, who seems to have flown in from another story). The real magic of Still Life is the elevation of the ordinary, the unabashed consecration of human experiences ... Sentence after sentence, character by character, Still Life becomes poetry.
