When a work is beautiful even in translation, it can do nothing but inspire awe... and so with this. At only 200 pages, it's a briskly-paced outline of the Chile of Isabel Allende's imagination, full of exaggeration and lyricism, and deeply absorbing. There's reminiscing about eccentric relatives, the excitement of the short-lived Unidad Popular government, the regime of fear that was Pinochet's... another element that I found interesting was the reflections on the patriarchal nature of Chilean society. In some ways it reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir, as these reflections too were coming from the perspective of a relatively upper-class woman, except that this book is better written! Ha ha.

No seriously though, there's a lot interesting in this book, and I found it so engrossing due to the way it's written. Also, it makes me really want to travel to Chile...