Allende novel seeks to spotlight footnote of history

‘The Words I Never Wrote’ full of twists and turns

By Kendal Weaver

Paul

by (Simon & Schuster) Three homeless teenagers in war-wracked Laos in 1969 find shelter in a once-grand farm manor that has been turned into a crumbling, makeshift hospital. Cries of patients are echoed by the scream of bombs. There is little food. Morphine is running out.

This manor, once the art-filled estate of a debauched French tobacco magnate, is the opening setting of Paul Yoon’s gripping new novel, “Run Me to Earth”. The house is an eerie, exhausting place where the teens hold each other to survive – sleeping, as one says, “like young animals in a den.”

The teens – 17-year-old boys Alisak and Prany and Prany’s sister, Noi, 16 – help a pianoplaying doctor, Vang, and his staff carry out medical duties at the farmhouse. They get around the territory on motorbikes. They are ostensibly on the side of the royal government as the insurgent communists, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese, move stealthily through rural backwaters.

But they also are at the mercy of the government’s ally, the United States, which over several years will drop a massive number of bombs on the countryside. Many of the bombs fail to explode – until triggered later accidentally by a passerby.

This aerial bombing campaign in Laos, and its deadly aftermath on the ground over ensuing decades, has rarely been the subject of American fiction. While the bombing is a dreaded backdrop in Yoon’s absorbing novel, his story is less about the war than about

Yoon

the humanity and hopes of the Lao people living in the midst of its horror.

“A Cold War?” says a woman nicknamed Auntie, who helps villagers escape. “So many didn’t even know the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist, they just wanted to survive.”

Yoon, highly regarded for his previous fiction, including the novel “Snow Hunters”, writes with a soft, measured hand. He calmly builds memorable scenes even when events turn violent.

The title comes from part of a line in a W.S. Merwin poem cited in the book’s epigraph: “I have worn the fur of a wolf and the shepherd’s dogs have run me to earth.”

The story unfolds in chapters that relate the experiences of main characters. Eventually it spans decades and takes on a global reach as scenes move from Laos to sites in New York, France and Spain. With the Indochina wars of the 1960s and 1970s darkening his canvas, Yoon brightens the mix with riveting colors of youth and innocence – even as they are being lost. were aboard the real-life SS Winnipeg, an old cargo ship organized by the poet Pablo Neruda to bring Spanish exiles to Chile. The book’s title comes from a Neruda poem.

The novel is strongest in its depictions of what innocent people endure when caught in the crosshairs of warring political parties. The main characters, Victor and Roser, are held at a French concentration camp before they earn passage on the Chile-bound ship. “In order to survive without going mad, the prisoners organized themselves,” Allende writes. “They sang, read whatever they could lay their hands on, taught those who needed it to read and write ... and sought to preserve their dignity cutting one another’s hair and checking each other for lice and washing their clothes in the freezing seawater.” The prisoners survived their meager rations by creating illusions of “restaurants with invisible food that the cooks described in great detail while the others savored the tastes with their eyes closed.”

While the Chilean president accepted the refugees, not all Chileans welcomed the idea. Allende captures this split in society, writing that “the right-wing newspapers claimed that other countries offered money, but none wanted to welcome Reds, those rapists of nuns, murderers, bandits, unscrupulous atheists, and Jews, who were bound to put the country’s security in jeopardy.” It is impossible not to see parallels with the dehumanizing language used these days about Latin Americans, Syrians and others, who are escaping violence in their homelands.

Unfortunately, the book is weighed down by its flaws.

To start, the dialogue is often stilted, with phrases and sentence structures divorced from how people actually speak.

The novel also spans more than 50 years, and at times it feels like the author struggled with the longevity of the narrative arch. Near the end, time-jumping transitions jarringly appear in the middle of chapters: “Three years after” and “Several years were to go by before he could keep his promise.”

Finally, Allende’s writing is sprinkled with cringe-worthy ethnic tropes: “drooping Arab eyelids”, “the quiet acceptance of an arranged marriage in India”, “You know what they do to (young women captured), don’t you? They hand them over to the Moors.” In one particularly flinch-inducing passage, she writes: “no one could doubt his solid Castilian-Basque lineage, with not a drop of Arab or Jewish blood in his veins.” Allende, who wrote her acclaimed debut novel, “The House of Spirits”, almost 40 years ago and is now 77, grew up in a different era. One could perhaps forgive her dated and inept use of racist language but one of her editors should have intercepted it. It is possible to evoke a time period without embracing its intolerance. tales of destruction and survival, cowardice and heroism. “The Words I Never Wrote: a Novel” by Jane Thynne is no exception to this rule. It is a welcome addition to the wealth of literature capturing this doomed period and place.

Thynne’s new novel spins a captivating tale of two young English women – sisters caught on two opposing sides of the war. Their story opens in 1936 at the elder sister’s wedding – on the English estate where she grew up – to a German industrialist. Irene Capel, the young English bride and aspiring artist, immediately assumes a new nationality and name: Frau Weissmuller. Her life in Berlin is filled with parties and dances and endless hobnobbing with the Nazi hierarchy.

Irene is to be separated from her sister Cordelia for the first time in her life. As a parting gift, she gives Cordelia a portable typewriter – an investment, as she says, in Cordelia’s future career as a writer. Devastated by the absence of her beloved sister, Cordelia soon makes use of that typewriter, when an unexpected opportunity at the Paris Bureau of a British newspaper lands in her lap. In the meantime, the rising hostilities in Europe threaten to tear the sisters apart, both physically and emotionally.

On one level, Thynne’s novel – and the trajectory of Irene’s story in particular – reads as a cautionary tale for anyone who chooses to disregard politics. Written during a tumultuous political year in the UK and the US in 2016, “The Words I Never Wrote” highlights the dangers of underplaying the power of divisive societal forces.

Irene may be naive when she first arrives as a new bride to her wealthy and well-connected husband’s estate in Berlin. Yet as her artist’s eye awakens to the barbarity of the Nazi party, Irene is trapped by her circumstances – a result of her own actions. As she understands in the last days of the war: “She had the sudden vivid realization that each choice, each split-second decision she had made until that moment, was what had made her life. She had shaped her life daily, the way a painter chooses pigments and lays down one brushstroke after another on the canvas… She had, at least, been the artist of her own existence.”

The beauty of Thynne’s novel is in the details. The vivid snapshots of life in Europe leading up to, during and after the war surprise and satisfy the most devoted readers of this genre: the frosted swastika and box of glass heads of Nazi leaders that Irene’s husband brings home to decorate the Christmas tree; the LSR (Learn Russian Quickly) graffiti peppering Berlin in the last gasps of the war; the maternity wards bursting with women in labor nine months after the Russian army took Berlin, where newborns – the products of rape perpetrated by the invading forces – were wrapped in newspapers rather than blankets.

It is, ultimately, Cordelia’s tale to tell. A character who was born to question the norm and break convention. She taps away at her portable typewriter – one of the precious gifts she receives from her sister – throughout the twists and turns of this story. (AP)