Allende’s prose style is simple, sometimes so unadorned as to seem awkward — perhaps an intentional tic or an artifact of its translation from the Spanish. Only over time does the novel’s multilayered story, with its occasional hints of a parallel spirit world, grip the reader and acquire poetic force.
The Japanese Lover feels, at first, as nutritious as Grandma’s freshly baked sugar cookies. But there’s nothing cloying about this unabashedly sweet story — and nothing unambitious about it, either.
Unfortunately, love’s intoxication, like the scent of the gardenias Ichimei sends Alma over many years, fails to lift this new novel above its thin plot and weakly motivated characters.
Character and plot are fairly thin...making it hard to become emotionally invested. Lover sheds light on some dark corners but doesn’t quite live up to its promise.
With her engaging new novel, The Japanese Lover, Allende brings us a tale at once global and rooted deeply in Bay Area history, sweeping through time and across continents to explore the inner lives of two very different women in contemporary California. At the same time, she offers us a unique narrative meditation on growing old.
Were this the work of a lesser talent than Allende, now 73, it would be a charming romance. But it’s hard to give up the belief that she is capable of more complex, subtle stories of the heart, which she undeniably knows very well.
Like the incomparable storyteller she is, Isabel Allende does not release us from the novel’s spell until the last pages, with a brief but bittersweet hint of her famed magical realism.
With end-of-life issues looming over Alma, The Japanese Lover can’t be called lighthearted. But it’s often wryly funny, and always an absorbing argument for the power of love.
Enjoyable as it is, The Japanese Lover doesn’t quite have the rich scope of Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea or Ines of My Soul. But it’s nice to have the prolific author back telling a family saga with meditations on forgiveness, compassion and love instead of a gruesome body count.
