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Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende, Margaret Sayers Peden (Translator)
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(Paperback - REPRINT)
- Pub. Date: May 2006
- 432pp
- Sales Rank: 20,734
Reader Rating: (116 ratings)
Detailed Rating: "Characters" See All
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: May 2006
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Paperback, 432pp
- Sales Rank: 20,734
- Series: P.S. Series
- ISBN-13: 9780061120251
- ISBN: 0061120251
- Edition Description: REPRINT
Synopsis
An orphan raised in Valparaíso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, young, vivacious Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. She enters a rough-and-tumble world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. With the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en, Eliza moves freely in a society of single men and prostitutes, creating an unconventional but independent life for herself. The young Chilean's search for her elusive lover gradually turns into another kind of journey, and by the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.
Miami Herald
A passionate storyteller….Her writing is lyrical, mystical, ribald, funny.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Aristocratic Chile is vividly evoked in Isabel Allende’s lyrical novels, in which a family’s past and future is linked inextricably with that of its country’s. A writer whose dreamy, imagistic books transport the reader to another time and place, Allende is considered by many to be the heir to Gabriel García Márquez’s lavish magic realism.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 116Reviews: 87
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Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allendeby kianaxD
Reader Rating:
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November 11, 2009: I believe Isabel Allende purpose for writing this book was to show people how hard it was to be a women and a feminst during this time. Isabel Allende wrote on the subject of feminism rather than another subject, beacuse sh probably supports this subject more than anyother subject And she probably has an emotional tie on this subject. The Daughter Fortue was about a girl named Eliza who was on a journey to find her one true love and she did but it wasnt the person she expected. Eliza was left on the doorstep of her adoptive parents as a baby. She led a comfotable rich life, until she met her first love, a poor man.She feel in "love" with this man She lost her innocence to this man. Soon her dream man left to california in search of gold, Eliza finds out she is pregnant. This is a horrifing thing to happen to her, because it is unexceptable for a girl her age, unmarried, rich, and very educated to be pregnant. So Eliza leaves her family in secret and stows away on a boat with the help of a chinese friend, Tao,who was forced into labour. Months in pregnancy and still on the boat hidden, Eliza has a miscarriage. She is devasted and ill. Luckily, Tao used to be a doctor in his home in China, he helped her trough out this difficult time in her life. Once she gets to California she is still determind to find her lover. Tao also jions her on her mission.
A beautiful epic story, sweeping through several countries and cultures, packed with intrigue, mysteby Anonymous
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August 22, 2009: I could not put this book down. The writing is beautiful, and the story easily carries you along. The characters are fully developed; you will come to feel that you know them and care about what happens to them. This was one of those books that I enjoyed so much, I was sorry when I finished. Later, I happily discovered there is a sequel - Portrait in Sepia. Portrait in Sepia is good, but Daughter of Fortune is much, much better. The audio version is excellent, too. I listened to it on tape and it was great.
Fact File
Name:
Isabel Allende
Current Home:
San Rafael, California
Date of Birth:
August 02, 1942
Place of Birth:
Lima, Peru
Awards:
Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1998; Sara Lee Foundation Award, 1998; WILLA Literary Award, 2000
Biography
In Isabel Allende's books, human beings do not exist merely in the three-dimensional sense. They can exert themselves as memory, as destiny, as spirits without form, as fairy tales. Just as the more mystical elements of Allende's past have shaped her work, so has the hard-bitten reality. Working as a journalist in Chile, Allende was forced to flee the country with her family after her uncle, President Salvador Allende, was killed in a coup in 1973.
Out of letters to family back in Chile came the manuscript that was to become Allende's first novel. Her arrival on the publishing scene in 1985 with The House of the Spirits was instantly recognized as a literary event. The New York Times called it "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America."
To read a book by Allende is to believe in (or be persuaded of) the power of transcendence, spiritual and otherwise. Her characters are often what she calls "marginal," those who strive to live on the fringes of society. It may be someone like Of Love and Shadows 's Hipolito Ranquileo, who makes his living as a circus clown; or Eva Luna, a poor orphan who is the center of two Allende books (Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna).
Allende's characters have in common an inner fortitude that proves stronger than their adversity, and a sense of lineage that propels them both forward and backward. When you meet a central character in an Allende novel, be prepared to meet a few generations of his or her family. This multigenerational thread drives The House of the Spirits, the tale of the South American Trueba family. Not only did the novel draw Allende critical accolades (with such breathless raves as "spectacular," "astonishing" and "mesmerizing" from major reviewers), it landed her firmly in the magic realist tradition of predecessor (and acknowledged influence) Gabriel García Márquez. Some of its characters also reappeared in the historical novels Portrait in Sepia and Daughter of Fortune.
"It's strange that my work has been classified as magic realism," Allende has said, "because I see my novels as just being realistic literature." Indeed, much of what might be considered "magic" to others is real to Allende, who based the character Clara del Valle in The House of the Spirits on her own reputedly clairvoyant grandmother. And she has drawn as well upon the political violence that visited her life: Of Love and Shadows (1987) centers on a political crime in Chile, and other Allende books allude to the ideological divisions that affected the author so critically.
But all of her other work was "rehearsal," says Allende, for what she considers her most difficult and personal book. Paula is written for Allende's daughter, who died in 1992 after several months in a coma. Like Allende's fiction, it tells Paula's story through that of Allende's own and of her relatives. Allende again departed from fiction in Aphrodite, a book that pays homage to the romantic powers of food (complete with recipes for two such as "Reconciliation Soup"). The book's lighthearted subject matter had to have been a necessity for Allende, who could not write for nearly three years after the draining experience of writing Paula.
Whichever side of reality she is on, Allende's voice is unfailingly romantic and life-affirming, creating mystery even as she uncloaks it. Like a character in Of Love and Shadows, Allende tells "stories of her own invention whose aim [is] to ease suffering and make time pass more quickly," and she succeeds.
Good to Know
Allende has said that the character of Gregory Reeves in The Infinite Plan is based on her husband, Willie Gordon.
Allende begins all of her books on January 8, which she considers lucky because it was the day she began writing a letter to her dying grandfather that later became The House of the Spirits.
She began her career as a journalist, editing the magazine Paula and later contributing to the Venezuelan paper El Nacional.
Feature Interview
From the March/April 2000 issue of Book magazine"Stories are like dreams; they follow their own rules," Isabel Allende says as she stands at a podium, addressing the audience in the Chicago Hilton and Towers' ballroom, where the Chicago Foundation for Women is holding its annual brunch. "The writer and the dreamer have so much in common: They can't control the plot, they are always part of the story or the dream."
It is this inability to control one's own destiny that has determined so much of the 57-year-old Peruvian-born writer's life and so much of her fiction. Starting her professional life as a journalist in Chile, in 1975 she was forced to flee to Venezuela to escape Augusto Pinochet's fascist regime, which two years earlier, reportedly with CIA assistance, had assassinated her cousin Salvador Allende, then president of Chile. She turned from journalism to novel-writing unexpectedly as well -- her first novel, The House of the Spirits, a sprawling tale of magic realism profoundly influenced by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, was originally intended to be a letter to her grandfather who was dying in Chile. The book Paula, written in response to the slow, painful death of her 28-year-old daughter, began as a series of journal entries and letters. On a more whimsical note, Aphrodite, a book about the twinned natures of eroticism and food, came from a dream Allende had about Antonio Banderas ("I placed him on a Mexican tortilla, slathered him with guacamole and salsa, rolled him up and ate him," Allende says).
Allende's Daughter of Fortune is a novel that mirrors its author's tendency to follow unexpected paths. Set in the mid-1800s during the height of the Gold Rush, it concerns an impetuous young woman named Eliza Sommers who leaves Chile in order to pursue the passionate, mercurial Joaquín Andieta, who has gone to California to seek his fortune. Eliza instead finds herself in an entirely different relationship with Tao Ch'ien, a Chinese doctor. At the end, Joaquín, the object of her quest, becomes not so much elusive as irrelevant. What begins almost as romance fiction, full of breathless embraces and stolen kisses, rapidly becomes a novel about Eliza's search for self-knowledge.
"Why did I choose that subject? Why that heroine in pursuit of love and freedom?" Allende asks. "Every book is related to some kind of quest. While I am writing, the quest is not clear, but sooner or later it becomes obvious. Maybe Eliza Sommers is me. Maybe I was her in another life."
You've been quoted repeatedly as saying that with your writing, you could seduce any man. What is it about your writing that you feel has the power to seduce?
I think that the greatest aphrodisiac is imagination, and if you can trigger something in a person's imagination, in a man's imagination, you can seduce him and make him love you, and this has been my life experience. I don't have a lot of raw material to seduce anybody, but I do have storytelling and that works.
Do you see parallels between yourself and Scheherazade in Arabian Nights who prolonged her life with stories?
No, because I have not had to save my life with my writing. But I have saved myself in the sense that until I became a writer I felt very frustrated. I felt that my life was going nowhere, that the jobs I had I didn't like, that I couldn't express something that I had inside that was suffocating. There was something choking me permanently and when I started writing, I realized that all the craziness that I had, all my madness could be challenged into a sort of universe that you create with the written word, a universe that is very personal and yet is big enough that other people are part of it as well. Every reader that reads one of my books becomes for a few hours part of that universe, and we share it and that is universal.
Still, even though you say that you didn't have to save your life with your writing, it has, in a sense, saved and protected you, particularly in writing Paula, in response to the loss of your daughter.
All my writing comes from some sense of loss or struggle. The House of the Spirits was the product of exile, and I don't think that I would have ever written that book without that experience. I would have been a journalist and a very happy one. I loved my job as a journalist, but then we had the military coup. I left my country and I couldn't find another job as a journalist, and for years I had this feeling that I wanted to write as I had written before, but there was nothing to write about, or maybe there was a lot, but I didn't have the excuse. Then, in 1981, when my grandfather was dying, I started a letter to him that became The House of the Spirits. He died without reading the letter, and I had the feeling that the book gave me back what I had lost -- a country, a sense of family and roots, belonging. Every one of my books is like trying to recover something, trying to become something.
What was Daughter of Fortune written in response to?
You know, I never know why I'm writing something usually until I read the reviews and then I get the book explained to me. When I wrote Daughter of Fortune, for seven years I had been researching. I wrote it very fast, but I didn't know why I had this compulsion, this obsession to write about the Gold Rush. I'm not particularly interested in gold or something that took place 150 years ago in a place that is not even in my country. Why was I so interested in this? I didn't know. And then, the book was published and I was invited to do the book tour in Spain, and my first interviewer explained what he thought the book was about, and I realized that he was absolutely right.
He said that this book is the story of a journey, a journey in time and space, but also a journey of the soul, a journey of a woman who comes from domestic captivity out into a masculine world and, in the process, loses much but gains something that she didn't know she was looking for.
She gains strength and freedom. In the process, she becomes very masculine; she even dresses like a man. She goes back to her feminine clothes, but never again in a corset, because she already has that inner freedom that makes her a full person. And the interviewer made the comparison of this story with the struggle of feminism in the last 50 years, of how women in my generation came out of our domestic captivity into a masculine world. As we reach a critical number of empowered women, we don't have to act like men anymore, and more and more we can be ourselves, still be women and have the strength and the freedom. The book is about freedom, which has been the most important issue in my life because I was not born free. I made myself free. It's about the struggle to be assertive, to be independent, to have economic independence, to get myself an education, which I was not given because I was a woman and it was not important to educate women at that time. I was supposed to be somebody's very good wife. I was supposed to be a lady. I was supposed to be a very good mother, but I was not supposed to be creative.
One of the things that comes up in a lot of your work is that you are frequently inspired by your dreams. Did that play a role at all in Daughter of Fortune?
Often, I find the solution for a problem in a book in a dream. You will find this really New Age-y, California, and I hate to talk about it, but because I write my dreams down, I have discovered what certain things represent for me. When I dream about children, they always represent the book, because I only dream of children when I am writing and what happens in the dream to the child happens in real life to the book. For example, with Daughter of Fortune, I had a dream of a child who cried with the voice of an old man. The next day, I went to check the narrative voice because there was something wrong there. It was not consistent. There was something that's not working. Sometimes I dream that there is a maze and I have to retrieve a child from the maze and I can't. I'm lost. That usually represents the plot. There are many things like this. With Daughter of Fortune, I remember that I woke up at night with the feeling that I had to go back to the writing, absolutely go back to the writing, and when I turned on the computer, I realized that the last sentence I had written the day before, which was "I am free now," was the end of the book. There was nothing I could add. All the chapters I had thought about were irrelevant. That really was the end of the book. My mother was really pissed. She said, "What?! This open ending?" And I said, "Mother, there is nothing I can add. This is the end."
Does your mother read all of your work?
She is my editor. She is the only person who corrects the books. She's seventy-eight and a sharp cookie and a terrible critic with a fat red pencil. She's the only person who reads my manuscripts before they're published.
Getting back to the topic of seduction, do you ever find yourself seduced by your writing? Do your own images captivate you?
Not when I'm writing. But I had a very strange experience last night. I didn't have anything to read, because I left the book I was reading on the plane, so I picked up a collection of short stories that I wrote in 1987. I had not opened the book since 1987. But since there was nothing to read, I started reading my own short stories that I had totally forgotten. I started reading them, and I was surprised at the images and the things that I had written that I feel that today I would be incapable of writing. I was another writer then. And something has happened. There's a sense of color and heat in that book that I no longer have, and I was seduced last night by that tone that I know that I can never have again.
Would you describe writing as a passionate process?
Passionate. Compulsive. Emotional. I find myself laughing and crying like crazy, and angry at the characters because they do things that I don't want them to and sometimes I hate them. They betray me all the time. I started Daughter of Fortune with two characters that I thought were great. This young man who was tormented, he was the devil lover, he was dark and handsome and he goes to find gold and then I couldn't find him again. I looked for him all over California. I couldn't find him. He just betrayed me and disappeared and became like a ghost—faint, blurred. And the Chinese guy who was supposed to appear for a few lines during a trip on a ship started to grow and grow and became the protagonist. That's the wonder of writing, that you don't know what's going to happen. I never work with an outline. I start adding words and ideas. It's like embroidery. I always say that a short story is like an arrow that has one shot and it has to get there and you need direction, precision, speed, the eye, the wrist to do it in one shot, while a novel is like embroidering a tapestry and you do not know the design. You work from the other side and you put threads and colors together, and then one day you turn it over and you see that there is a design and there is something there that you didn't know was there.
One issue that comes up fairly often in Daughter of Fortune is your displeasure with how history has been written.
It's written by males, white males generally. When I researched the Gold Rush, I realized that most of the history books were written by white male historians. Most of them had not even lived in or around the area. But then I went to the letters that the wives of pioneers wrote, the letters that uneducated miners wrote to their families, the recipes that they would share. That's what interests me -- the daily lives, not the vision of the victors who wiped out the people of color and got the gold. I know people who are alive today, who still saw signs in restaurants that said, "No Mexicans or dogs allowed," and that comes from the time of the Gold Rush -- no people of color, no Chinese, no Peruvians or Chileans. These people were dogs, even though they were there before the whites and they taught the whites how to pan the gold and how to get the gold and then they were deprived of everything. The whites made laws to take away everything from the people of color. The women who came were mostly prostitutes, and they had a very hard time. The worst of them were the Chinese who were brought as sex slaves. Some of them were eleven-year-olds. Their life expectancy after they entered the trade was three years. Who wrote the stories of these girls? These sex slaves kept on coming or being brought in containers from China up to 1920, in Chinatown in San Francisco. Everybody knew about it. The authorities knew about it, but until the Presbyterian missionaries got in there and tried to solve the problem, everybody thought, "Oh, these were just Chinese. Who cares about the Chinese?" This is what interests me. The margins. Not the story of the victors.
It seems as if power is defined by the individual who gets to tell the story, whether the story is used to colonize, to re-tell history, to seduce.
Absolutely. It is so powerful—the choice of words, the way you tell things. The first thing that the military did after the coup in Chile was to change the textbooks. The period of [Salvador] Allende was erased from the books. Those years never existed. Then name of Allende never existed. This is how you can change history. With a story. With a word.
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
Isabel Allende's wide international readership will be well satisfied after the six-year wait for Daughter of Fortune, an ambitious romance laden with drama and sensuality. The Chilean author came to international recognition with her debut novel, the highly acclaimed The House of the Spirits (1985), a multigenerational saga of the Trueba family culminating in the horrors of the country's 1973 military coup. Allende has been consistently carving out her literary niche ever since, through the novels Of Love and Shadows (1984), Eva Luna (1988), and The Infinite Plan (1993); with short stories, a memoir, and eclectic musings on the erotic and culinary interspersed between them. In these works, Allende established an unmistakable voice and a set of concerns that form the essential foundations on which Daughter of Fortune is built, but beyond which the book attempts to expand.
The story begins in mid-19th century Valparaíso, Chile, then a thriving British port and the most compelling of the narrative's many settings. Enter Jeremy and Rose Sommers, a brother and sister pair who have established themselves at the head of expatriate society, valiantly tending the delicate flower of Victorian ways on the harsh alien soil. When an infant is abandoned on their doorstep, Rose considers the child a divine consolation for her forgone motherhood, and the foundling completes their unconventional familial situation. The baby, whom they name Eliza, is destined to become a courageous and deeply individual young woman. She grows up between worlds, spending her days half with her native-Chilean nanny immersed in the bustle of the kitchen and household chores, and half with Rose, practicing the piano, shopping for small luxuries, and bathing in tubs of skin-softening milk. The tension in her divided identity climaxes when Eliza encounters Joaquín Andieta, a destitute but passionate revolutionary, and immediately falls madly in love with him. After a somewhat unfulfilling affair, Joaquín dashes off to California to try his luck at the newly-discovered gold mines. Soon after Joaquín leaves, Eliza discovers that she is pregnant, and circumstances force her to pursue him as a stowaway in the hold of a ship.
The events that follow this crucial decision fall like a series of dominoes set in motion. Eliza meets the traditional Chinese healer Tao Chi'en, who will become a crucial part of her life. She has a miscarriage and nearly dies in the two-month sea journey; upon disembarking, she is forced to disguise herself as a Chinese and later a Chilean youth; under the guise of looking for her "brother" Joaquín, she voyages up and down the bitter landscape of the Gold Rush, eventually settling for a time as a piano player in a brothel of kindly whores. Despite an astonishing amount of historical detail, Allende is weaker on American soil, flattening characters and situations with a heavy hand. Ultimately, Tao tracks Eliza down and brings her back to San Francisco, where together they vigorously set about extricating prostitutes from the evil clutches of the avaricious madams in Chinatown. All this time, Eliza has not ceased her search for Joaquín, but eventually a shocking twist of events causes her to finally relinquish him. Liberated at last, she and Tao are now free to act on the love they have gradually found for each other.
Allende deftly weaves a lush tale of four continents into this absorbing page-turner. Her writing is passionate, earthy, and sensorially overwhelming, richly evocative of exotic locales, sexual exploration, and the driving force of destiny. Yet the novel's epic proportions and scope are at times achieved at the expense of character development and realism: Jeremy and Rose verge on fossilized Victorian clichés, while Tao is far too much the stereotypical Chinaman, another of the "mute ants" invading the American Pacific Coast in droves. Allende's storytelling, while retaining the spellbinding quality of The House of the Spirits, here navigates new territory. Perhaps deliberately attempting to evade the label of magical realism that has been conferred, all too often, upon her earlier work, Allende skirts around the supernaturalism her readers may be expecting. Gone are the clairvoyance and long green tresses of House, the closest Daughter comes to magic is in a brief visitation from Tao's dead wife Lin. On the other hand, the feminism and the emphasis upon journeys of personal liberation which have come to be associated with Allende are everywhere in evidence in this text. In fact, it reads in many ways like a feminist allegory, in which the conventions of Victorian society, Chilean chauvinism, and even American materialism are eschewed in favor of multicultural blending and a blurring of gender roles. In the end, after experiencing the rough new land of exploding possibilities in the guise of a man, Eliza is sufficiently liberated to freely choose her femininity for herself in her new life with Tao. It is an optimistic and triumphant conclusion to an extravagant odyssey.
—Monica Ferrell
From the Publisher
An orphan raised in Valparaíso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, young, vivacious Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. She enters a rough-and-tumble world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. With the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en, Eliza moves freely in a society of single men and prostitutes, creating an unconventional but independent life for herself. The young Chilean's search for her elusive lover gradually turns into another kind of journey, and by the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.
Miami Herald
A passionate storyteller….Her writing is lyrical, mystical, ribald, funny.
Washington Post
Like a slow, seductive lover, Allende teases, tempts and titillates with mesmerizing stories.
Boston Globe Magazine
Allende is one of the most important novelists to emerge from Latin America in the past decade.
Time
Allende projects a woman's point of view with confidence, control and an expansive definition of romance as a fact of life.
Entertainment Weekly
Allende details her plot and settings richly.
Miami Herald
The Chilean novelist possesses the eyes, ears, mind, heart and pluck to manufacture generous and feisty fiction. . . . [A] rambunctious picaresque about love and obsession.
Los Angeles Times
An extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the 19th century world. . . . entertaining and well paced . . . compelling.
Philadelphia Inquirer
. . . among the elements a narrator can bring to a book are heightened mood, a different slant on the words, a tone, an atmosphere. Blair Brown does all this and more.
Los Angeles Times
An extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the 19th century world. . . . entertaining and well paced . . . compelling.
San Francisco Chronicle
A fast-pased adventure story.
Boston Sunday Globe
Allende is a unique and staggering storyteller with an enviable talent for intricate narratives . . . Once the reader submits to her wizardry, a florid, detailed universe of hopes and lust, of class struggle and quarreling individual identities, unfolds.
Denver Post
Allende has created a masterpiece of historical fiction that is passionate, adventurous, and brilliantly insightful. And right up to the end, it's suspenseful and surprising.
New York Times Book Review
A "rich cast of characters . . . a pleasurable story. . . . In Daughter of Fortune, Allende has continued her obsession with passion and violence.
San Francisco Chronicle
A fast-pased adventure story.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Allende interweaves a densely layered tale of passion with the stuff of history and legend.
Philadelphia Inquirer
. . . among the elements a narrator can bring to a book are heightened mood, a different slant on the words, a tone, an atmosphere. Blair Brown does all this and more.
Entertainment Weekly
Allende details her plot and settings richly.
Miami Herald
The Chilean novelist possesses the eyes, ears, mind, heart and pluck to manufacture generous and feisty fiction. . . . [A] rambunctious picaresque about love and obsession.
Denver Post
Allende has created a masterpiece of historical fiction that is passionate, adventurous, and brilliantly insightful. And right up to the end, it's suspenseful and surprising.
Austin American Statesman
. . .a complex, touching and magical tale of real lyrical power,delivered by Blair Brown, one of the most talented audio readers.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Allende interweaves a densely layered tale of passion with the stuff of history and legend.
The Boston Sunday Globe
Allende is a unique and staggering storyteller with an enviable talent for intricate narratives . . . Once the reader submits to her wizardry, a florid, detailed universe of hopes and lust, of class struggle and quarreling individual identities, unfolds.
Vogue Australia
Daughter of Fortune is full of energy and vivacity. It holds out a promise of happiness.
Boston Sunday Globe
Allende is a unique and staggering storyteller with an enviable talent for intricate narratives . . . Once the reader submits to her wizardry, a florid, detailed universe of hopes and lust, of class struggle and quarreling individual identities, unfolds.
Vogue Australia
Daughter of Fortune is full of energy and vivacity. It holds out a promise of happiness.
Publishers Weekly
Allende expands her geographical boundaries in this sprawling, engrossing historical novel flavored by four cultures—English, Chilean, Chinese and American—and set during the 1849 California Gold Rush. The alluring tale begins in Valparaí:so, Chile, with young Eliza Sommers, who was left as a baby on the doorstep of wealthy British importers Miss Rose Sommers and her prim brother, Jeremy. Now a 16-year-old, and newly pregnant, Eliza decides to follow her lover, fiery clerk Joaquí:n Andieta, when he leaves for California to make his fortune in the gold rush. Enlisting the unlikely aid of Tao Chi'en, a Chinese shipboard cook, she stows away on a ship bound for San Francisco. Tao Chi'en's own story—richly textured and expansively told—begins when he is born into a peasant family and sold into slavery, where it is his good fortune to be trained as a master of acupuncture. Years later, while tending to a sailor in colonial Hong Kong, he is shanghaied and forced into service at sea. During the voyage with Eliza, Tao nurses her through a miscarriage. When they disembark, Eliza is disguised as a boy, and she spends the next four years in male attire so she may travel freely and safely. Eliza's search for Joaquín (rumored to have become an outlaw) is disappointing, but through an eye-opening stint as a pianist in a traveling brothel and through her charged friendship with Tao, now a sought-after healer and champion of enslaved Chinese prostitutes, Eliza finds freedom, fulfillment and maturity. Effortlessly weaving in historical background, Allende (House of the Spirits; Paula) evokes in pungent prose the great melting pot of early California and the colorful societies of Valparaíso and Canton. A gallery of secondary characters, developed early on, prove pivotal to the plot. In a book of this scope, the narrative is inevitably top-heavy in spots, and the plot wears thin toward the end, but this is storytelling at its most seductive, a brash historical adventure.
Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Allende's first novel in six years (The Infinite Plan, 1993, etc.) delivers her gentle, often plush style at extravagant length to tell the life of Eliza Sommers, a Chilean woman who immigrates to San Francisco in the 1840s. Abandoned as a baby in the British colony of Valparaiso, Eliza is raised by Jeremy and Rose Sommers, a prosperous pair of siblings who consider the girl a gift. For unmarried Rose, Eliza is compensation for the child she's always lacked; brother Jeremy is pleased that the infant legitimizes their odd cohabitation. A thriving seaport, Valparaiso welcomes sailors and hucksters in abundance: Jeremy is a ship's captain, and one Jacob Todd a Bible salesman without official sanction. Todd quickly falls for Rose, though she misunderstands him and thinks he's fallen in love with young Eliza. Some 200 pages later, Eliza falls in love with Joaquín Andieta, who her pregnant and then sails for the promise of gold in California. Eliza follows, miscarries during her passage north, and is befriended by Tao Chi'en, a Chinese physician. (His early struggles and departure from Asia are treated in detail.) Meanwhile, Eliza wanders through California with undiminished hope. This takes years, and along the way Tao Chi'en is transformed from his traditional ways, while Eliza adopts the role of a man and encounters dozens of curious people. Back in Valparaiso, the Sommers pair regret their loss but are given hope of tracking Eliza down when Todd—now a newspaper reporter—tells them he's seen her. Finally, after Eliza discovers that Joaquín, having become a bandit, has been murdered, she and Tao Chi'en are free to explore their (so-far unexpressed) lovefor each other. Allende has clearly enjoyed providing rich elaborations that don't particularly advance the story here but affirm her theme of personal discovery. Each of her characters finds "something different from what we were looking for." With this novel, the same may not be said of readers who enjoy Allende's fiction.
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: May 2006
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Paperback, 432pp
- Sales Rank: 20,734
- Series: P.S. Series
- ISBN-13: 9780061120251
- ISBN: 0061120251
- Edition Description: REPRINT
Table of Contents
Reading Group Guide
Plot SummaryCan we control our own destinies? What does it take to change the course of our lives so that we may pursue our dreams? And how do we know that our decisions are the right ones, especially if we hurt others or ourselves in the process? These are the questions posed by Isabel Allende's fascinating story of bravery and passion, of a young woman's incredible journey from one world to another, from innocence to wisdom. Born into a 19th-century society that values birthright above character, Eliza Sommers is at a startling disadvantage. An orphan of unknown heritage, Eliza is raised in the British colony of Valpara’so, Chile, by the Victorian spinster Rose Sommers and her brother Jeremy. She is not even sure how she arrived at the Sommers household-only that she is lucky enough to be cared for, educated, and even loved by her adopted family. So when Eliza exhibits the signs of a first love, the women in her life come to her "rescue," certain that this adolescent passion will lead to trouble. But Eliza's feelings for Joaqu’n, a young, penniless revolutionary, are all-consuming. Meanwhile, in America, gold has been discovered in the hills of northern California, and by 1849, everyone is swept up in the promise of the Gold Rush. When Joaqu’n leaves Eliza in hopes of striking it rich in California, she is determined to follow him there, risking every comfort and certainty she has ever known.
Allende's portrait of California illustrates the chaos and excitement of the Gold Rush-the promise of wealth, and of a new world. Like Valpara’so, San Francisco is a major port into which foreigners stream daily. But Eliza is a stranger in California. Cloaking her identity-and hersex-she must carve out a new life for herself by whatever means possible. Like thousands of other newcomers, and like her Chinese friend Tao Chi'en, she is thrust into a melting pot of unfamiliar languages and customs. But Eliza and Tao Chi'en quickly learn the value of assimilation, gradually discarding their own suspicions and prejudices. Eliza's love for Joaqu’n leads her to California, but the majesty of the land, the opportunities it holds, and the chance to reinvent herself as a woman in control of her own life are forces that eventually usurp her youthful infatuation. Spirited and sensual, willful and determined, Eliza is a modern woman living in a world that is just learning to be modern. Her courageous story compels us to look beyond the boundaries imposed on us by others and by ourselves. And it teaches us that by opening our minds - and our hearts - we are opening ourselves up to golden opportunities for love, happiness and good fortune.
Topics for Discussion1. Eliza thinks that the facts of her birth don't matter: "It is what you do in this world that matters, not how you come into it," she claims. Ta Ch'ien, on the other hand, cannot imagine "his own life apart from the long chain of his ancestors, who not only had given him his physical and mental characteristics but bequeathed him his karma. His fate, he believed, had been determined by the acts of his family before him." How do these different beliefs determine the way Tao Chi'en and Eliza make decisions about their lives? What are your own feelings about ancestry and self-determination?
2. Eliza grows up under the influence of a number of strong individuals--Mama Fresia, Rose, Jeremy Sommers and his brother, John. What does she learn from each of people? How do their differing philosophies contribute to Eliza's experience of the world? How do they shape her personality?
3. In 19th century Chile, a married woman could not travel, sign legal documents, go to court, sell or buy anything without her husband's permission. No wonder Rose doesn't want to get married! How would the lives of the women you know be different under those conditions? What are the consequences in a society that limits the freedoms of a segments of its citizens?
4. What do you think Allende means by referring to Eliza as a "daughter of fortune?" How are the different definitions of the word "fortune" significant in Eliza's story and the novel as a whole?
5. How is Tao Chi'en a "son" of fortune? What are the crucial turning points in his life, and where do they lead him? To what extent is he responsible for his own good and bad fortunes?
6. "At first the Chinese looked on the foreigners with scorn and disgust, with the great superiority of those who feel they are the only truly civilized beings in the universe, but in the space of a few years they learned to respect and fear them." writes Allende about the arrival of Western peoples into Hong Kong. How is this pattern of suspicion, fear, and resigned acceptance repeated throughout the novel? How does Allende illustrate the confusion of clashing cultures in Valparaiso, on board Eliza's ship, and in California? Do you think people of today are more tolerant of other cultures than they were 150 years ago?
7. While Eliza is vulnerable in California because of her sex, Tao Chi'en's prospects are limited because of his race. How do both characters overcome their "handicaps?" What qualities help them make their way in a culture that is foreign and often unwelcoming?
8. What do details such as Mama Fresia's home remedies and her attempts to "cure" Eliza of her love for Joaqu’n, or Tao Chi'en's medical education and his habit of contacting his dead wife say about the role of the spiritual in the everyday life? Must the spiritual and the secular remain separate? What about the spiritual and scientific worlds?
9. How have the novel's characters - Rose or Jacob Todd, for instance - managed to create opportunities out of the obstacles they've faced? What do you think Allende is saying about the role that fate plays in our lives, and about our capacity to take control over our own destinies? How are we all sons or daughters of fortune?
About the Author Nacida en Perú, Isabel Allende se crió en Chile. Algunos de sus libros,La casa de los espíritus, De amor y sombra, Eva Luna, Cuentos de Eva Luna, El plan infinito, y más recientemente, Paula, traducidos a más de 25 lenguas, en cabezan la lista de bestsellers en varios paises de America y Europa. Isabel Allende reside actualmente en California.
Forewords & Introductions
October 1999In 1985, Isabel Allende published The House of the Spirits, a fantastical, political Chilean novel that hit the bestseller lists and established her as one of the best Latin-American writers. Now, with Daughter of Fortune, Allende again returns to writing fiction, and in this book she combines the Latin-American lifestyle with the setting of the United States during the gold rush of the mid-19th century. Eliza Sommers, a young Chilean woman brought up by an upper-class British family, heads for California to find her lover, a lower-class man who had set out for America to find his fortune. Read an excerpt from the first chapter of Daughter of Fortune below.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Eliza
Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory. She used the first to earn a living and the second to recall her life — if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer's poetic vagueness. The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice. She used to tell her faithful friend, the sage Tao Chi'en, that her memory was like the hold of the ship where they had come to know one another: vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and sacks in which all the events of her life were jammed. Awake it was difficult to find anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could, just as Mama Fresia had taught her in the gentle nights of her childhood, when the contours of reality were as faint as a tracery of pale ink. She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness. She put as much store in that process as others put in numbers, and she so refined the art of remembering that she could see Miss Rose bent over the crate of Marseilles soap that was her first cradle.
"You cannot possibly remember that, Eliza. Newborns are like cats, they have no emotions and no memory," Miss Rose insisted the few times the subject arose.
Possible or not, that woman peering down at her, her topaz-colored dress, the loose strands from her bun stirring in the breeze were engraved in Eliza's mind, and she could never acceptthe other explanation of her origins.
"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."
"You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine," Mama Fresia rebutted behind her patrona's back.
But Eliza's birth was a forbidden subject in that house, and the child grew accustomed to the mystery. It, along with other delicate matters, was never mentioned between Rose and Jeremy Sommers, but it was aired in whispers in the kitchen with Mama Fresia, who never wavered in her description of the soap crate, while Miss Rose's version was, with the years, embroidered into a fairy tale. According to her, the basket they had found at the office door was woven of the finest wicker and lined in batiste; Eliza's nightgown was worked with French knots and the sheets edged with Brussels lace, and topping everything was a mink coverlet, an extravagance never seen in Chile. Over time, other details were added: six gold coins tied up in a silk handkerchief and a note in English explaining that the baby, though illegitimate, was of good stock — although Eliza never set eyes on any of that. The mink, the coins, and the note conveniently disappeared, erasing any trace of her birth. Closer to Eliza's memories was Mama Fresia's explanation: when she opened the door one morning at the end of summer, she had found a naked baby girl in a crate.
"No mink coverlet, no gold coins. I was there and I remember very well. You were shivering and bundled up in a man's sweater. They hadn't even put a diaper on you, and you were covered with your own caca. Your nose was running and you were red as a boiled lobster, with a head full of fuzz like corn silk. That's how it was. Don't get any ideas," she repeated stoutly. "You weren't born to be a princess and if your hair had been as black as it is now, Miss Rose and her brother would have tossed the crate in the trash."
At least everyone agreed that the baby came into their lives on March 15, 1832, a year and a half after the Sommers arrived in Chile, and they adopted that date as her birthday. Everything else was always a tangle of contradictions, and Eliza decided finally that it wasn't worth the effort to keep going over it, because whatever the truth was, she could do nothing to change it. What matters is what you do in this world, not how you come into it, she used to say to Tao Chi'en during the many years of their splendid friendship; he, however, did not agree. It was impossible for him to imagine his own life apart from the long chain of his ancestors, who not only had given him his physical and mental characteristics but bequeathed him his karma. His fate, he believed, had been determined by the acts of his family before him, which was why he had to honor them with daily prayers and fear them when they appeared in their spectral robes to claim their due. Tao Chi'en could recite the names of all his ancestors, back to the most remote and venerable great-great-grandparents dead now for more than a century. His primary concern during the gold madness was to go home in time to die in his village in China and be buried beside his ancestors; if not, his soul would forever wander aimlessly in a foreign land. Eliza, naturally, was drawn to the story of the exquisite basket — no...
Daughter of Fortune. Copyright © by Isabel Allende. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Read a Sample Chapter
Chapter One
Eliza
Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory. She used the first to earn a living and the second to recall her life-if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer's poetic vagueness. The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice. She used to tell her faithful friend, the sage Tao Chi'en, that her memory was like the hold of the ship where they had come to know one another: vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and sacks in which all the events of her life were jammed. Awake it was difficult to find anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could, just as Mama Fresia had taught her in the gentle nights of her childhood, when the contours of reality were as faint as a tracery of pale ink. She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness. She put as much store in that process as others put in numbers, and she so refined the art of remembering that she could see Miss Rose bent over the crate of Marseilles soap that was her first cradle.
"You cannot possibly remember that, Eliza. Newborns are like cats, they have no emotions and no memory," Miss Rose insisted the few times the subject arose.
Possible or not, that woman peering down at her, her topaz-colored dress, the loose strands from her bun stirring in the breeze were engraved in Eliza's mind, and she could never accept the other explanation of herorigins.
"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."
"You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine," Mama Fresia rebutted behind her patrona's back.
But Eliza's birth was a forbidden subject in that house, and the child grew accustomed to the mystery. It, along with other delicate matters, was never mentioned between Rose and Jeremy Sommers, but it was aired in whispers in the kitchen with Mama Fresia, who never wavered in her description of the soap crate, while Miss Rose's version was, with the years, embroidered into a fairy tale. According to her, the basket they had found at the office door was woven of the finest wicker and lined in batiste; Eliza's nightgown was worked with French knots and the sheets edged with Brussels lace, and topping everything was a mink coverlet, an extravagance never seen in Chile. Over time, other details were added: six gold coins tied up in a silk handkerchief and a note in English explaining that the baby, though illegitimate, was of good stock-although Eliza never set eyes on any of that. The mink, the coins, and the note conveniently disappeared, erasing any trace of her birth. Closer to Eliza's memories was Mama Fresia's explanation: when she opened the door one morning at the end of summer, she had found a naked baby girl in a crate.
"No mink coverlet, no gold coins. I was there and I remember very well. You were shivering and bundled up in a man's sweater. They hadn't even put a diaper on you, and you were covered with your own caca. Your nose was running and you were red as a boiled lobster, with a head full of fuzz like corn silk. That's how it was. Don't get any ideas," she repeated stoutly. "You weren't born to be a princess and if your hair had been as black as it is now, Miss Rose and her brother would have tossed the crate in the trash."
At least everyone agreed that the baby came into their lives on March 15, 1832, a year and a half after the Sommers arrived in Chile, and they adopted that date as her birthday. Everything else was always a tangle of contradictions, and Eliza decided finally that it wasn't worth the effort to keep going over it, because whatever the truth was, she could do nothing to change it. What matters is what you do in this world, not how you come into it, she used to say to Tao Chi'en during the many years of their splendid friendship; he, however, did not agree. It was impossible for him to imagine his own life apart from the long chain of his ancestors, who not only had given him his physical and mental characteristics but bequeathed him his karma. His fate, he believed, had been determined by the acts of his family before him, which was why he had to honor them with daily prayers and fear them when they appeared in their spectral robes to claim their due. Tao Chi'en could recite the names of all his ancestors, back to the most remote and venerable great-great-grandparents dead now for more than a century. His primary concern during the gold madness was to go home in time to die in his village in China and be buried beside his ancestors; if not, his soul would forever wander aimlessly in a foreign land. Eliza, naturally, was drawn to the story of the exquisite basket-no one in her right mind would want to have begun life in a common soap crate-but out of respect for the truth, she could not accept it. Her bloodhound nose remembered very well the first scents of her life, which were not clean batiste sheets but wool, male sweat, and tobacco.The next smell she remembered was the monumental stench of a goat.
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