Month: June 2009

Isabel Allendes’ tale of a powerful woman in Spain’s exploration and settlement of Chile is of necessity mythical but it is grounded in historical, often brutal and shocking, detail.  Ines becomes the mistress of Pedro de Valdivia, indefatigable conquistador, who never stops battling the equally determined Chilean Indians of Southern Chile.  Later she marries a nobel spirited junior officer to Valdivia who becomes governor for a time and elevates her to the status and possessions of a governor’s wife.

Throughot it is Ines who copes with the survival needs of the colonists from food to medical aid while the men tend fo battles and politics.  The unbelievable hardships of these new world invaders as well as the tribes they exterminate is made clear as well as the ruthless warring of the Pizarro brothers in Peru.

The Swedish writer Marianne Fredriksson helps us experience the problems and prejudices both toward and by immigrants in this story of an unlikely friendship between Swedish born Inge and Chilean emigre Mira. What brings them together is a common love of flowers; what keeps them together is their feminine experiences with men and life in general

All new to me were the insights into the Cilean revolution and brutal suppression abetted by our CIA assassination of legitimate reform presiident Allende. Also the bigotry of the Chilean upper classes toward the lower.