Paradise
- Toni Morrison
----------------------

The story begins in 1976 in Ruby, an affluent all-black Oklahoma town with a population of a few hundred, and flashes back to the men and women who founded the town after the Civil War.

When the novel opens, a woman lies dead in the front hall of the Convent, a former Catholic retreat just outside Ruby. The town's ‘alpha males’ have driven over and shot her, and then begin hunting down the remaining inhabitants - Connie, Seneca, Grace, Pallas and Mavis are the prey, female refugees who gathered in this safe place. These women have done nothing wrong. Their crime is the fact that they are different, their ‘otherness’, their non-conformity to the unspoken rules that the inhabitants of Ruby follow. Their practices are vaguely occult and vaguely threatening to the acceptable norms at Ruby. The men mistrust them. In short, they are killed because they can be.

Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these women and launches into a series of flashbacks and interwoven stories. As we soon discover, beneath the seemingly “all’s perfect” façade that the townsfolk project, Ruby is deeply fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles. Its only a matter of time before the leading citizens of Ruby look for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them perfect targets. And so it comes to be that one morning, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ‘ethical cleansing’. The irony here is that in this ‘all-black’ town created by victims of the Civil War, the oppressed themselves become the oppressors in the end.

Toni Morrison knows how to create fabulous characters. In this book she draws amazing, rich, full-length portraits of the four Convent dwellers as well as their executioners. It makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling.

MY INVENTED COUNTRY
A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile.
By Isabel Allende.

If you are a fan and have have read House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, or other novels by Isabel Allende, this book will bring out many of those fictitious characters, places and names in the context of a very real history and social setting.
Strangely, Isabel Allende herself was not born in Chile but in Lima, Peru, where she lived until she was 4. When her father, a secretary at the embassy, deserted the family Allende's mother was forced to return to her native Santiago. Allende spent the next five years living in Chile, until she moved to Bolivia, where her stepfather, another diplomat, had been posted. After two years in Bolivia, the family moved to Lebanon. She spent three years in Beirut before the civil war of 1958 caused the family to scatter: Allende and her brothers returned to Chile, and her mother moved to Spain before joining her husband in Turkey.
For the most part, she would remain in Santiago for nearly another two decades, marrying, working as a journalist and having a family before circumstances forced her to leave once again. In 1975, two years after the brutal military coup that toppled the socialist government led by her father's cousin, Salvador Allende, she fled, sleepless and trembling with fear, to Venezuela, ''carrying a handful of Chilean soil from my garden.'' For more than a decade, Allende lived in Caracas, until the publication of her first novel, ''The House of the Spirits,'' and the dissolution of her first marriage freed her to begin a new life in California, where she has lived ever since.
It isn't easy to piece together this timeline while reading this book. To make a coherent story of her experiences, a reader must sift and reorder fragments of information that are offered throughout the book.
Throughout the book, Allende seeks to present her view of what is the essence of Chile, often by contrasting it to other countries and traditions. She deals with subjects such as divorce, the role of women, and religion with anecdotes. Don’t be misled by the title, referring to a journey through Chile. Certainly, this book is about Chile. And the early section does lay out the physical landscape, quoting from the country's most famous poet Pablo Neruda. But this book is not a travelogue. Nor is it a deep historical or sociological analysis of Chile. Rather, it is an intensely personal and autobiographical view of the country through the eyes of one of its best known novelists, and partly from the vantage point of San Francisco, her adopted hometown in an adopted land.
The theme of displacement and identity recurs throughout the book, and very powerfully in the symbolism of the two September 11 dates which deeply marked the writer's life - the one in 1973 when her uncle Salvador Allende was overthrown and died in a violent CIA-backed military coup, and the other, more recent and memorable date in 2001.
However, the freshest and most specific images in this book all come directly from Allende's life. Some of the loveliest writing is about her maternal grandfather, a ''formidable man'' who ''gave me the gift of discipline and love for language.'' Clearly this autocratic and idiosyncratic man had a large and lasting influence on Allende, and the picture of him that she creates in these pages is full-bodied and affecting. He was a man who ''never believed in germs, for the same reason he didn't believe in ghosts: he'd never seen one,'' and who admired the young Isabel's desire to be strong and independent but was unable to foster or even condone such unfeminine characteristics. One of the more deep, emotional moments in the book is when she must leave him, when she flees Chile after Pinochet takes power.
If you enjoy Allende's novels or even other Latin American fiction, this book provides some interesting insights from a deeply engaging writer.