Refugee stories melt your heart
In a New York blizzard, Richard, a professor of Latin American Studies, rearends a car driven by Evelyn Ortega, a young undocumented immigrant. Unsure of how to help the terrified woman and unaware of the multiple reasons for her panic, he enlists his colleague Lucia, a Chilean refugee-turned-lecturer who rents his basement flat.
The set-up is fatalistic — two experts in refugee issues encounter a young refugee in need of help. Thrown together, they begin to reveal their histories to each other and, in the bitter snow of winter, they each begin to unexpectedly unfreeze.
Allende is careful not to limit the concept of “refugee” to non-whites or South Americans; Richard’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany, who tried to instil in his son a sense of debt to those who helped him escape. It’s for Richard to pay the debt by helping immigrants, something he has neglected to do. He is an emotional refugee from his tragic past until Evelyn’s appearance challenges him with a crisis that can’t be ignored.
The focus on refugees and undocumented immigrants could not be timelier; Trump’s antiimmigrant rallying is mentioned briefly. Allende’s novel humanises refugees by individualising them, raising them from the invading hordes of Conservative rhetoric.
She reveals the social context of Evelyn and Lucia’s difficulties and the inevitability of their displacement. Neither woman was responsible for the events that forced them to leave their homes.
Evelyn’s journey north exposes the realities of trying to cross the US border, so fraught with difficulty and danger that no one would attempt it if not utterly desperate.
The device that ultimately drives the presentday narrative is unexpectedly melodramatic. It functions successfully to bind the characters together and force their confessions but in a novel that walks a fine line between gritty realism and the magical dynamics of fate and destiny, it wavers occasionally into black comedy.
However, the movie-like unreality of the present-day events casts the past into sharp contrast, like cold winter shadows. The intertwined stories form a dramatic and sometimes beautiful journey through intense suffering to redemption and love.