Ines of My Soul

Customer Reviews

• Wonderfully Allende through and through  Nov 14, 2006 (41 of 42 found this helpful)

  Based almost entirely on the life of Ines Suarez who lived from 1507 to 1580, Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende is a lyrically written story of passion, ruthless exploration, rugged courage and love in the 16th century. Allende is one of the few authors that are wonderfully decriptive writers who have the ability to write beautiful and flowing prose and make the reader feel as if they're witnessing and experiencing a scene rather than just reading about it.
  
  Poor and nearly destitute, Ines has a rough life in Spain. Alone because her husband has left to make his fortune in the new world she eventually sets out to search for him. When she arrives Ines learns he has been killed. Determined to make a new life for herself Ines decides to remain in the new colony. She eventually falls under the spell of Don Pedro de Valdivia, field marshal of Francisco Pizarro. Together they undertake the founding of the country of Chile.
  
  Richly textured with wonderfully developed historical characters, Allende has written another masterpiece. For those who have their appetites wetted for further reading on this period of history, Allende includes a helpful bibliography that she freely admits is incomplete. I wonder though how many of these titles will be available in English. I also suspect that many of them are rare and may be difficult to locate.
  
  You'll want to read Ines of My Soul slowly because there isn't much out there of its equal. Savor it.

• Allende's Best Novel  Nov 7, 2006 (31 of 33 found this helpful)

  In Inés of My Soul, Isabel Allende has written her finest novel, and I read it in one sitting, so impressed by it and so drawn into it was I. The lushness of her prose and her descriptive abilities have never been used in quite this way, and as Allende describes the virginal South American wilds, I was left in amazement at her accomplishment. I have always admired Allende as a writer, but I have been frustrated in the past at what I have seen as her unnecessary and detracting forays into the supernatural, which has intruded (as in House of the Spirits) into an otherwise rational plot. Nothing precisely like that comes to pass in this book, and insofar as it does, it seems less an affront in its setting here than it had at other times, and that also impressed me.
  
  Inés of My Soul tells the story of a real life sixteenth-century figure, the bold and enterprising survivor, Doña Inés Suárez, who, along with her lover, the dashing Don Pedro de Valdivia, founds the great city of Santiago, Chile. Writing a remembrance from the vantage point of extreme old age (seventy years and near death) Doña Inés tells of growing up in Spain, then of course the world's most powerful and wealthy nation, and also describes to the reader her eventual voyage to Peru, in search of her husband, Juan, who had traveled to the New World before his wife, as one of Pizarro's conquistadors. Upon learning that her husband has died in battle (and finding that the man was not all she had once thought him to be) Doña Inés, left there in Peru with initially limited options, eventually is swept away by a dashing warrior and lover named Don Pedro de Valdivia. Together the pair go on to make the journey south to the wilds and are afterward remembered as among the founding figures in the modern nation of Chile. From her antiquity, Doña Inés tells the story of all this, and does so in a way that mesmerizes the imagination even as she---or more accurately Allende---teases the intellect and almost makes one forget until reminded of the human toll that was inextricably part of wedding together the distant lands of Chile and Spain.
  
  I found this to be an enjoyable and visually-powerful work of fiction. It impressed me in a number of ways, and I recommend it to those who admire this gifted South American writer, who feel drawn to its historical and geographical setting, or to anyone looking for a good read this season.

• Ines: from poor seamstress to Spanish conquistadora.  Nov 10, 2006 (19 of 19 found this helpful)

  "This is my story," Isabel Allende's heroine writes, "and that of a man, Don Pedro de Valdiva, whose heroic feats were recorded by chroniclers in rigorous detail; his exploits will endure in those pages till the end of time. However, I know Valdiva in a way history could never know him: what he feared and how he lived" (p. 99).
  
  Since her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits, best-selling New York Times author Allende has been recognized as one most gifted novelists in the world today. Written as a personal memoir in the year 1580 to her stepdaughter Isabel, and based on the life of a real Spanish conquistadora, INES OF MY SOUL tells the extraordinary life story of seventy-year-old seamstress, Doña Inés Suárez (1507-1580), from her poor childhood in Spain, to her adventurous journey into the New World in search of her missing husband, Juan de Malaga, to becoming the heroine instrumental in building the city of Santiago and the nation of Chile with Pedro Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro, and the lover who turned her life "upside down." "I could not live without him," she writes. "One day without seeing him and I was feverish. A night without being in his arms was torment. At first, more than love, I felt a blind, reckless passion for him, which overcoming obstacles placed in our path by destiny, passion gave way to love. I admired him as much as I desired him; I succumbed totally before his energy; I was seduced by his courage and his idealism" (p. 99). The Spanish Inquisition, which prevented them from marrying, only intensifies their forbidden love.
  
  INES OF MY SOUL is what readers have come to expect from Allende, a multilayered historical novel that is not only well researched, but a poetic "work of intuition" (as Allende describes it) that is nothing less than a pure pleasure to read for its fierce battles and passionate romance.
  
  G. Merritt

• Well-imagined version of the Spanish conquest of Chile  Dec 8, 2006 (20 of 21 found this helpful)

  Although Allende deserves credit for resisting any impulse to impose modern sensibilities on her sixteenth-century protagonist, she doesn't succeed in creating in Ines a character I could understand or relate to. I realize Ines was a creature of her times, but many human feelings are universal across eras and cultures, and I needed help from the author to connect with Ines' dogged love for Juan (which seemed somewhat shallow), her religiosity, and her tolerance of -- and even participation in -- extreme cruelty and violence. The first-person narrative gives us the impression that she is a highly intelligent person, but it does not reflect a fully dimensional character. There is a tantalizing reference to her being intellectually mentored by a priest, but details of that relationship aren't there. I read through the novel mostly because it is a highly accessible narrative of the historical events as they probably occurred. It may be the enticement I needed to tackle Bernal Diaz' or William Prescott's histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. However, for a first-time Allende reader, who wants an un-put-downable historical novel I recomnmend instead her excellent Daughter of Fortune.

• History and the price paid  May 24, 2007 (6 of 6 found this helpful)

  I have enjoyed other novel by Isabel Allende and found this one interesting on several different levels. Her writing is always evocative and unfailingly filled with sly references to characters foibles and shortcomings.
  This novel had a touching frame of reference: the narrator is a 70 year old woman dictating her memoirs to a daughter. Yet while the book is an enthralling historical romance it is also filled with disturbing violence. She includes some bibliographic references but it is unclear what is fact and what is the author's invention. I sensed parallels with the uneasy state of the world today in the depiction of torture and the brutal treatment of prisoners It certainly brought attention to the central issue that the colonization of Chile was a tragedy to the Indians and attained at the cost of enormous bloodshed.
  Is the book successful? The central character is complex but hard to connect with. Her courage is exemplary yet as the matriarch of a country she fails in several key ways to inspire us.