Island Beneath the Sea

     

    

    Hi everyone! Here’s my final blog post of the year! I decided to start Isabelle Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while now. After reading Eva Luna, I wanted more of Allende’s writing style and this novel was perfect! I’ll be going back to my roots by doing a short review for you all! In Island Beneath the Sea, we follow a couple of different perspectives although Zarité, or Tété is the main focus as she navigates her life throughout the late 18th to 19th century in Haiti as a slave (if you have been paying attention to history, you’d be aware of the slavery system that existed until 1801). Similar to Eva Luna, this is a novel that chronicles most of Tété’s life with traces of romance throughout as she evolves as a person. 

   I really like Allende’s style of writing and the magical realism she creates works very well with the setting. Tété practices voodoo magic and is involved with many West African rituals. I believe that Allende’s incorporation of voodoo is important to the plot, and it helps characterize Tété more as well as kickstart some of the magical elements in the novel. Additionally, something I have enjoyed about Eva Luna and Island Beneath the Sea is the uniformity of plot and characters as they age. I assumed that since these novels have large time jumps there would be a lack of consistency, however, I was surprised when I found that the characters didn’t immediately change into completely different people. Obviously, as time progresses your personality can change, however, Allende manages to capture how this occurs realistically, a feature that I feel is not present in a lot of novels I have read with large gaps in time. 

   Unfortunately, there are some issues with the information presented throughout the novel. Firstly, it is important in my opinion to acknowledge that Allende herself is not Haitian nor African American, which led me to feel a little uncomfortable by the use of the word “negro” quite often throughout the novel. Island Beneath the Sea was published in 2010, which surprised me as some of the language seemed to be more outdated. Adding to this, I found that Allende did have some kind of strange jumps between attempting to fit in Haitian history that is both accurate and relevant to the plot. I understand that trying to fit decades of history into a 400-page novel would be complicated, however, I think Island Beneath the Sea does have a few areas in which Allende’s tone of narration is lost to a slightly more lecturing tone on Haiti. 

    So, what are my overall thoughts? I think Island Beneath the Sea is quite a heavy novel, however it is one that I think would be quite interesting for anyone who is interested in these topics. I would suggest looking at some of the content warnings before jumping in, but this novel did meet my expectations with a few moments of uncertainty. Thanks so much for reading!

            - Nona R.