The Sum of Our Days

By Jane Hoback, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 3, 2008 at 3 p.m.
Updated April 7, 2008 at 4:23 p.m.

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The Sum of Our Days

* Nonfiction. By Isabel Allende. HarperCollins, $26.95. Grade: A-

Book in a nutshell: Allende's newest memoir is a sequel to Paula, which the author wrote as a letter and family history to her daughter, who lay in a coma for a year before she died. The Sum of Our Days picks up the story 13 years later when Allende and her "tribe," as she calls the close-knit group of family and friends who are her intimates, gather to scatter Paula's ashes in a northern California forest.

This memoir is also a letter of sorts to Paula, as well as a chronicle of the lives of a cast of characters who rival any in Allende's novels: Her husband. Her son, whose first wife leaves him for the girlfriend of Allende's stepson (yes, really). Parents, stepchildren, grandchildren, friends and assorted ghosts and spirits.

With her usual skill at mixing raucous and sometimes ribald humor with sorrow and mysticism, Allende recounts in surprisingly intimate detail their marriages, infidelities and divorces, their joys and tragedies, their successes and failures and therapy sessions from their home base in Marin County, Calif. She lets the reader in on the stories behind her books and the movies made from some of them.

She doesn't let herself off the hook, either - she admits she meddles unmercifully. It's part letter, part diary, part political essay, part meditation on aging and the state of the world.

Best tidbit: Allende said that when writing Portrait in Sepia, several characters from her previous novel, Daughter of Fortune, "made their way into the pages of the new book and there was nothing I could do to stop them." She also realized that she could connect those two novels with her first, The House of the Spirits, and make a trilogy. "The unfortunate thing is that in one of the books Severo del Valle loses a leg in the war, and in the following book he has two; that is, somewhere there is an amputated leg floating in the dense fog of literary errors."

Pros: Thanks to Allende's masterful storytelling, this memoir reads almost like fiction. It rarely lags. She's as honest about her own failures and flaws as she is about those of the other members of the tribe.

Cons: Allende's latest memoir will inevitably be compared to Paula, and it will come up short. How could it not? Allende's elegiac tone poem for her daughter stands as her best work. And The Sum of Our Days seems a little too chock-full at times. Some events that could be fleshed out get short shrift at the expense of others that could have been left out altogether.

Final word: Allende's own remarkable story continues to be captivating.

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