Critical Essay | Critical Review by Ruth Behar

SOURCE: "In the House of the Spirits," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. XIII, No. 2, November, 1995, p. 8.

Below, Behar praises Paula as "immensely life-affirming."

"Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost." With those simple, enchanted words, the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende begins Paula, a memoir of devastating passion dedicated to her daughter. Sadly, unlike Sleeping Beauty, Paula Frias Allende will never awaken to hear her mother's tale. She has fallen, at the age of 28, into a sudden coma caused by the rare illness of porphyria, which has left her speechless, motionless, lost in an angelic stupor that is broken only rarely by tears and trembling. As her mother unfolds her tale, patiently seeking to awaken Paula and bring her back to the world of the living, Paula edges closer to...
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