Portrait in Sepia
Written by Isabel Allende
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Narrated by Blair Brown
The presence of an illustrated family tree in multi-generational storytelling is an interesting dilemma at the beginning of a novel. Do you read through to try and understand names you haven’t met? Do you refer back to it as the threads begin to weave together and ruin plot-lines that depend on marriages? Do you ignore it completely and only look when you’ve reached the end? The beauty of reading an audiobook is that all these questions are answered for you. Not knowing there was a family tree in the physical copy, I did debate looking up a character map leading up to the end of Portrait in Sepia, ultimately deciding not to because whatever I didn’t understand could be explained to me in Book Club where this reading was assigned.
I have never had the pleasure of reading Isabell Allende before, but after Portrait in Sepia I want to read everything she’s ever written, especially the other two books loosely connected to this one. She creates relationships, framing political upheaval through family squabbles, and builds characters from nothing into stories that could fill books with people only mentioned in passing. When she describes a person, they become uniquely formed, I know what they look like better than the person sitting across the bus from me, and they may look totally different than another reader’s interpretation of the text. I am in love with her vivid writing. One character could be be a villain of the story, yet by the end share drinks over laughter with someone they had deeply wronged earlier on, all happening in a parlor so well known by that page that I can close my eyes and see it. She also has a way of writing around gruesome experiences, referring to them from an exterior perspective, keeping you on your toes until she decides to describe a visceral scene of wartime amputation.
While Allende wrote a phenomenal family epic, it was the narration by Blair Brown that elevates Portrait in Sepia to that next level of word-craft. Brown had a clear and engaging voice throughout. Sometimes an audiobook narrator can lean into character so much that descriptions come across as smarmy or judgmental, depending on the tone they’ve adopted by whoever holds the point of view. Brown’s descriptions were separate from the voices of her characters, who were performed with such skill that the experience felt more than a book, more akin to watching a play performed by one actor. Whether someone was British, American, or Chilean, the accents and dialectic work was flawless. Characters weren’t just separated by regionality either. Even if there had been only five voices, all from the same town, I am certain Brown would imbue each with its own life, bringing diversity to all of the roles she played for every second of the book.
I know it’s not a novel idea to consider Isabell Allende as one of the greater authors writing, but that doesn’t change the truth of it. I’m not sure how much the translation by Margaret Sayers Peden influence the text, but it feels directly from the author herself, there is clarity in the english that must exist in the original text. On top of everything leading up to the moment, I don’t know if I’ve had as satisfying a “that’s the title of the book!” as Portrait in Sepia provides.