|
|
|
|
|
|
The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir
written by Isabel Allende
Studio : Harper
by Harper
Release Date : 2008-04-01
Publisher : Harper
Released : 2008-04-01
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780061551833
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 16 reviews)
List Price : $26.95
Our Price : $14.75
|
|
| |
|
Product Description |
|
In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss—the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily letters the author and her mother, who lives in Chile, wrote to each other, Allende bares her soul in a book that is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. She recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her that becomes a new kind of family. Throughout, Allende shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory. Here, too, are the amazing stories behind Allende's books, the superstitions that guide her writing process, and her adventurous travels. Ultimately, The Sum of Our Days offers a unique tour of this gifted writer's inner world and of the relationships that have become essential to her life and her work. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, bound together by the love, fierce loyalty, and stubborn determination of a beloved, indomitable matriarch. |
| |
|
| |
|
For Diehard Fans |
In terms of literature, a bit of a disappointment -- it certainly isn't a candle on "Paula," and I kind of agree with the reviewer who said it seemed hastily written. It does, and there's little of the lyrical language that made "Paula" such a treat.
On the other hand, it IS interesting to see more of the whole "tribe" here, and people are depicted more as real people, including Isabel herself. I was shocked and surprised to find that Paula, who came across as almost too saintly in the last book, didn't like children, but it made me like her a lot more as a real person. (Perhaps it was just her youth; I can imagine her, like many woman, wanting a child as she got older.)
I'd say this book is best for people who have already read a lot of Allende and are interested in her and her family. I wouldn't start anybody off with this one, and even for diehard fans, the hardcover price may be a bit much. I'd say wait for the paperback or borrow from a library. |
| |
|
Isabel 'slams' Christians... |
|
...which is bizarre because her daughter Paula was a Christian believer (according to Isabel herself in 'Paula'). Isabel kind of free-associates through this whole book, not really seeming to 'land' anywhere. We discover that she's a witch who belongs to a coven in the Bay area, who pulls random people she meets and likes into her family, and we're given brief snippets of their lives. Towards the end of the book she starts laying into Christians, of which I'm one, and talks about a 'new religion' she created for her grandchildren. Her ignorance of the Bible and Christianity is striking. She has an uninformed, cartoonish caricature of Christians in her mind as being white and Southern - it's apparent she's never really known a Christian before, except for her own beloved daughter, Paula (ironically enough)! Isabel forgets (?) that Christians are also Asian, Indian and African. Apparently she doesn't know that the list of 'ignorant' Creation-believing Christians includes J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a very few. I realize an author takes a personal risk when writing their memoir. I know way more about Isabel now than I need to know. This book was plodding, ignorant and uninformed in areas, disjointed, and overall difficult to get through. I have to admit that I've lost some respect for her. |
| |
|
Delightful and entertaining. |
Enlightening as well.
"Love is a lighting bolt that strikes suddenly changing us."
This clever sentence resumes the lives of the generations of this story. As readers, we are touched in different ways. In my case, the core of my heart and inner motives were shaken.
A story written with candor, filled of joyful times and also very sad, devastating moments. All of them told with a sense of humor that honors everybody's dignity. This story couldn't have been written in a different way.
Thank you Isabel. |
| |
|
Allende Never Disappoints Her Audience |
|
I have read every book Isabel Allende has written beginning with, The House of Spirits, and her novels have never disappointed me. I love her wisdom and the lessons her novels teach about the human spirit. As a teacher, I recommend her books to reluctant readers fully knowing that they'll be captivated into her magical world. This memoir reads like her fictional novels. |
| |
|
Just what a memoir should be |
"It's hard for me to let go of people," Isabel Allende said of her deceased daughter Paula. "[She] is unreachable; only in my love for her are we in contact. She comes in signs." Pretty intense, right? Well, buckle up my friends. If you delve into THE SUM OF OUR DAYS, Allende's most recent book, you will find a bumpy, funny, delectable, brutally honest and provocatively fascinating look into the private life of her extensive and complex brood of a family. Written in daily letters to her mother back in Chile, Allende pours out the deepest and darkest secrets of her extended family post-heartbreak, the early death of her only daughter. In the wake of her mourning, she weaves a long and wavy path to her true heart, and every word is riveting.
Allende is known as a "magic realist," her stock in trade as an author. However, there is little magic and lots of realism in THE SUM OF OUR DAYS. For a nation obsessed with "family values," its newest citizen goes completely against the traditional American grain with her topsy-turvy, emotionally harrowing life. Her second husband is a garrulous and outspoken attorney and advocate for illegal immigrants in the Bay area; his daughter is a drugged-out mess in and out of jail cells, which he hopes will teach her the "consequences" of her criminal acts; and her son is married to a former member of Opus Dei, who walks a straight (and completely bigoted) religiously fueled road. There are endless characters in THE SUM OF OUR DAYS, all the more intriguing because of the unflinching honesty and bright light that Allende shines on their every course of action, their every life decision, and the way that it intersects with her own difficult life.
The death of her daughter has been the subject of another book (simply titled PAULA). It is clear from the content of this memoir that her broken heart will never completely mend, and the well-established credo that no parent should have to bury a child is utmost in her mind. Allende pulls no punches when discussing the bottomless love she has for her children, in life as in death, and it is this moving portrayal of motherhood that gives great heart to the stories about her family members. This is really a book about not just the sum of her family's "days," but the sum of her own multitudinous adventures as writer, mother, wife, lover, daughter, activist, immigrant, teacher...
If you think that it would be an epic maneuver to pull it all into one book, you would be right. But Allende somehow finds just the right anecdotes about each member of the family to make the reader feel as if he or she was being escorted into the author's boudoir and seduced into the vortex of her life and longings. It is rare that desire has so many names, but Allende finds them all and, in short order, brings them to life on the page with a power that towers over so many of the recent memoirists in this popular genre. There are no lies here, there is no Frey or Burroughs amping up of actual life to ensure a chuckle or gulp from the reading public. Allende doesn't have to play tricks to make your heart and breath rise and fall, to make your stomach tumble each time Willie's indigent daughter almost dies (again!) or your heart break each time Allende looks back on a moment during her daughter's strangely quick descent into serious illness.
THE SUM OF OUR DAYS is exactly what a memoir should be: a heartfelt and candid look at the good, the bad and the oh-so-ugly that makes up a truly human life. Like reality TV, we are hooked and cannot look away, whether we like it or not. This is a rewarding emotional rollercoaster in which a world-renowned author searches for the same answers as the rest of us, sidestepping disaster upon disaster with a warmth of spirit and an everlasting hope that any reader will find unbearably inspiring.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
|
| |
|
|
|
