In The Midst Of Winter

Healed By Love

Isabel Allende’s latest novel gets it title from an Albert Camus quote: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

This beautiful line evoking hope, and maybe love, becomes the foundation of Allende’s In The Midst Of Winter (translated by Nick Calstor and Amanda Hopkinson), about three people damaged by their past, but coping with their despair in their own way.  A freak snowstorm brings them together, and the innate decency of two of them propels the story forward.

After her powerful debut, The House Of The Sprits, Allende keeps returning to the political turmoil in Latin America, particularly Chile where she was born and witnessed Pinochet’s reign of terror. In this book, the suffering of Lucia Maraz in Chile and Evelyn Ortega in Guatemala and the chronic guilt of Richard Bowmaster caused by a personal tragedy, sit uneasily between the noir adventure that they get involved in.

Lucia is a professor who had escaped the political pogrom in Chile, and after a miserable marriage that produced a lovely daughter, she divorced her uncaring husband; she now teaches in Richard Bowmaster’s department at NYU and lives as a tenant in his dank basement. In her early sixties, Lucia still “misses sex, romance, and love. The first of these she could obtain every so often, the second was a matter of luck, and the third was a gift from the gods that would probably never happen,” Allende writes of her situation.

Her colleague and landlord, Richard, lives like a hermit and rebuffs all of Lucia’s offers of friendship and food. One day, when Brooklyn is hit by an awful snowstorm that brings the city to a halt, Richard is out driving in the snow because one of his cats is sick, when he hits the back of a car driven by Evelyn, a Guatemalan nanny, who works for a New York gangster, with false papers. Richard gives her his card so that he can pay for repairs later. However, the girl turns up his apartments, terrified and incoherent, because there is a corpse in the trunk of the car, which she was not permitted to drive in the first place. Now that car is damaged and she has seen the body, she is afraid of her boss’s wrath.

Richard is unable to understand what Evelyn is saying, so he calls Lucia to help translate. While they decide what to do, they share their stories—which is a bit of a clumsy device. Evelyn’s brothers were brutally killed and she was raped, before her grandmother makes arrangements to send her to the US, with a “coyote” or agent who helps illegal migrants cross the border to the US. Feeling sorry for her, Lucia decides they must help Evelyn by dumping the car and the body—the harebrained enterprise made easier with the snow all around, but also tough, because it is madness to get out and drive in poor visibility and biting cold.

Allende tries to blend black comedy with horrific tragedy and strong emotions, which can be disconcerting for the reader; but she also manages to somehow ennoble the crime of the characters, because of what they have been through.  Allende’s writing, even in translation, has passages of lyricism that makes this book readable, though it cannot be counted among her best.

In The Midst Of Winter

By Isabel Allende

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 336