The Island Beneath the Sea
Encyclopedia
The Island Beneath the Sea is a 2010 novel by Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

an author Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende Llona is a Chilean writer with American citizenship. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts , which have been commercially successful...

. It was first published in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 by HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

. The book was issued in 2009 in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 as La Isla Bajo el Mar, and was translated into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 by Margaret Sayers Peden
Margaret Sayers Peden
Margaret Sayers Peden is an American translator and Professor, being a Missouri native and born in about 1920.-Career and Achievements:She returned to college to obtain her graduate degrees in later life...

, who has translated all (except the first) of Allende's books into English.

Plot

The story opens on the island of Saint-Domingue
Saint-Domingue
The labour for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves . Between 1764 and 1771, the average annual importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000; by 1786 it was about 28,000, and from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year...

 (current day Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

) in the late 18th century. Zarite (known as Tete) is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. As a young girl Tete is purchased by Violette, a mixed race courtesan, on behalf of Toulouse Valmorain, a Frenchman who has inherited his father's sugar plantation. Valmorain has big dreams of financial success and is somewhat ambivalent towards slavery. He views it as a means to an end, as he does most things.

Upon Valmorain's marriage, Tete becomes his wife's personal slave. Valmorain's wife is fragile, beautiful, and slowly succumbs to madness. As Valmorain's wife goes mad, Valmorain forces Tete, now a teenager, into sexual servitude, which produces several illegitimate children. Spanning four decades, the narrative leaps between the social upheavals from the distant French Revolution to the Haitian slave rebellion in all its brutality and chaos, to a New Orleans fomenting with cultural change.

External links

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