Thursday 19th       11:00 am to 12:15 pm

Residence of:        Dilnaar Ahmadullah

THE JAPANESE LOVER BY ISABEL ALLENDE

Themes of lasting passion, friendship, reflections in old age and how people react to challenging circumstances all feature in Allende’s latest saga, which moves from the traumatic WWII years to modern San Francisco.

A wealthy elderly designer, Alma Belasco, decides to move to a retirement home where she hires Irina as her personal assistant.  Alma has a mysterious life with secretive excursions from her nursing home and mysterious yellow envelopes arriving. Intervening sections reveal the lifelong bond between Alma, a Polish Jewish refugee sent to live with California relatives in 1939, and Ichimei, the sensitive youngest son of her family’s Japanese gardener. Despite many separations over the years, their love remains strong. Descriptions of the Japanese forced internment at a Utah camp, where life continues behind barbed wire, create a memorable impression. Equally haunting is Irina’s painful backstory. The novel has all the ingredients of classic Allende: love, secrecy, fate; stories within stories; the arc of history.

The Japanese Lover lies firmly in blockbuster territory. However the book has had mixed reviews and it will be interesting to debate how Allende’s writing has evolved into her more mature years

Shalini Lunia                                                     Francesca  Pasquantonio