Richard calls his tenant Lucia, a middle-aged visiting Chilean professor under his direction at N.Y.U., to help. She turns up at his apartment later that night, distraught and unintelligible, her Spanglish broken by a stammer she developed after suffering a brutal gang assault in her native Guatemala. Richard, a lonely, aging professor, sets out in a car from his Brooklyn apartment and collides with a vehicle being driven by Evelyn, an undocumented immigrant who happens to be driving her employer’s car. In fact, the story owes less to magical realism than to histrionic crime dramas. Seemingly intended to stab at the surreal, fablelike quality for which Allende is known, they come off as merely soppy and uninspired.
As if this premise is not sufficiently hackneyed, Allende adds literary insult to injury by spelling it out in breathy prose: “Over the next three days, as the storm wearied of punishing the land and dissolved far out to sea, the lives of Lucia Maraz, Richard Bowmaster and Evelyn Ortega would become inextricably linked.” The novel is riddled with such formulations. In Isabel Allende’s new novel, a snowstorm and a car accident bring three people together on an unexpected journey that transforms their lives. IN THE MIDST OF WINTER By Isabel Allende Translated by Nick Calstor and Amanda Hopkinson 342 pp.
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