"En Alta California ..."

[saavedra77]

"With this document, I intend to set the record straight before the slanderers who are determined to defame Zorro have their say. Our enemies are many, as is often the case with those who defend the weak, rescue damsels in distress, and humiliate the powerful. Naturally, every idealist attracts enemies, but we prefer to count our friends, who are much greater in number..."

It took me all of 4 hours from hearing (on NPR, today) about Isabel Allende's Zorro to buying a copy. Isabel Allende! The hardest part was deciding whether I was up to reading it en español or not ...

Comments

[morganminstrel.livejournal.com]

Let me know how it is. I've been seriously considering giving it a try, although literary figures doing pulp fiction doesn't always turn out well. Thus my trepidation. ;-)

But I'm willing to give it a go if you like it. Allende is, after all, a good writer....

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Have to say that it was rather uneven.

Allende sets out to give us the character's origins and youth, with the action spread from California to the Caribbean to Europe: the bizarre circumstances that brought Diego de la Vega's parents (a down-at-heel Castillian hidalgo and a Shoshone woman--making Zorro a mestizo, which would actually explain a lot ...) together in California, the formation of his mischievous, impetuous personality there, his European education, & finally the circuitous route he has to take to get back to California as a young man and become the Zorro we know.

I was surprised to find that the strongest part of all this is the section set in Barcelona from 1810 - 1815, dealing with Diego's education. Partly, this is simply because of a great setting: Allende's Napoleonic Barcelona is replete with dueling societies, gypsies, guerillas, French occupation troops--it's a romanticized version of Goya's Spain, basically. But this is also the section where the character comes of age, gets his first taste of romantic rivalries, political intrigue, and masters his foil & epee.

By contrast, the section dealing with Diego's youth in Alta California seems sketchy, folkloric, a little unfinished. And the later Caribbean digression reminded me of one of those novels with Fabio on the cover ... ;)