The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel AllendeSophia A. McClennen
Isabel Allende. Daughter of Fortune. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. HarperCollins, 1999. 432 pp. $26.00.
Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read female writers from Latin America. Her trademark style of a popularized magical realism combined with predominantly female characters has made her narratives accessible and entertaining to a wide public. Yet it is precisely the qualities that draw her work to a broad audience that also, arguably, mark her narrative style as a simplified version of the work of such literary legends as Gabriel García Márquez or José Donoso. Allende blends history, politics, fantasy, and passion into her work in a way that does not shock the reader and through tales that inevitably end happily.
Daughter of Fortune follows in this path, but does differ from her earlier work in a number of salient ways. Spatially the novel moves beyond Chile and also takes place in a gold-rush-stricken California. Her characters are fairly similar to those found in her other novels, i.e., a female protagonist with special skills (this one can disappear at will) and a nanny who is far more connected to reality than her employers, but this novel also includes British, American, and Chinese characters and creates a greater multicultural mix than in her previous work. Stylistically the novel is less sensational, and the characters are far more commonplace, lending more credibility to the narrative. Moreover, the time period of the 1849 Gold Rush is quite different from Allende’s earlier work, which has generally covered contemporary Chilean history. Perhaps the strongest feature of the novel is the way that the protagonist recognizes that her identity does not depend entirely on the man she loves. In fact, this character, because she spends years disguised as a boy, allows the novel to ask a number of interesting questions about gendered identities. [Sophia A. McClennen]