Violeta by Isabel Allende

This book is large in scope, much like A Long Petal of the Sea, covering the whole of a person's life and using that time frame to reflect on what has happened in both Chile and the world over the course of a person's lifetime. Violeta was born in 1920 at the tail end of the Spanish Flu, which came later to Chile than to the rest of the world. Her father's response to keeping his family safe is perhaps a criticism of what happened in some places both during the last pandemic and the current one, where prevention and life preservation took a back seat to things like the economy and political gain. The book is written as a letter to her treasured grandson, and ends at the front end of the COVID pandemic. Violeta is born to a rich family, members of Chile’s governing class. However, its security is destroyed by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Depression that follows. After her father’s death, her only reliable brother Jose Antonio removes her, with her mother and Irish governess Miss Taylor, to the remote and backward south of the country where she grows up in a self-contained colony and assists the family’s benefactors, a married couple who work as itinerant teachers of the poor indigenous peasantry. Her marriage to a well-meaning German agronomist fails because he is impotent and bores her. She leaves him for a dashing and impressive pilot, Julian, who proves a scoundrel. Violeta's life is constrained not just by her choices but also by the domestic and state constraints that are imposed upon her, and a sweeping story of Chile's political situation over the past 100 years is told in just a few pages per year.