Last summer, Michel and I embarked on a month-long road trip. I was very optimistic. I had started Isabel Allende’s Zorro a couple of weeks before we left and didn’t get very far, what with the planning and packing and last minute shopping, but I was so confident I’d finish it in our first week of travel that I brought it plus three other books. I was wrong. I actually finished it the day we got home. 6 weeks to read a 380-or-so page book. So as I write this, I have to acknowledge how the circumstances in which I was reading impacted my experience of the book.
In Zorro, Allende imagines an origin story for the legendary Robin Hood-esque character of Spanish California. The son of a wealthy Spanish don and a Shoshone warrior, Diego de la Vega grows up both straddling the worlds of his parents, learning the ways of his maternal Shoshone relatives from his grandmother and activities befitting a Spanish landowner from his father. His sense of justice forms early as he witnesses the brutal horrors perpetrated against the Native peoples of the region, including his best friend Bernardo’s mother, by the European settlers. As a teenager, Vega is sent to Barcelona for his education, and there studies fencing and joins La Justicia, a secret organization dedicated to serving the poor oppressed under Napoleonic rule. It is here that his identity as Zorro, the Fox, begins to take shape, and the legend that will sweep California is born.
Allende creates an origin story worthy of the legendary masked hero. Filled with daring swordfights, midnight rescues, unrequited love, sea journeys, pirates, bandits, assassination attempts, jealousy, dashing disguises, break-ins to a notoriously impenetrable prison, and a strong sense of morality and social justice, this novel has it all. Allende’s gorgeous, flowing, heart-stopping prose weaves a tale that truly has something for everyone. She structures the book as a written account by a mysterious author close to Zorro, someone he has trusted to be custodian of his story, and this structure allows for a potentially superficial swashbuckling narrative to also have an intimacy that centers the humanity of Zorro and his dedication to serving the powerless. It makes a much more compelling origin story, grounding de la Vega and his alter-ego in both his personal experiences and the socio-political realities of his time.
For all of the lushness of Allende’s prose, however, I often felt like I was at a bit of a remove from the story, as if I was following the action and listening to these conversations and interactions from around the corner or behind a curtain. It felt like I was skimming across the surface of the story, which created an interesting tension with the intimacy provided by the omniscient narrator. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it even now, but it certainly stood out as I read and continues to color my thoughts on the book.
Lastly, the pace. I honestly cannot tell you how this book reads. For all its adventure and derring-do, it took me so long to read. SO. LONG. On the one hand, I vastly underestimated how much energy I would have to read at the end of each day. I somehow thought that after a day of driving, hiking, exploring, eating, picture taking, and what have you, I’d have plenty of energy to read a chapter or two each night. As it was, I usually made it through a couple of sentences before falling asleep, and it sometimes took me a few days to get through one paragraph. But even when we built in rest time to read during the day, I found that I never made as much progress as I thought I would. The narrative is densely packed, both with action and description, so it is very easy to feel like you’ve read twenty pages when you’ve actually only read ten. And while in many ways, I love that kind of dense, evocative prose, when you are on week four or five of a book that normally would have taken you one to two weeks to read, motivation to keep going can take a dip.
I share all of that not to discourage anyone from reading this book–quite the opposite, in fact. But I do think that reading Zorro in such different circumstances than I normally read highlights for me how much of an impact the context and situations around reading can have on someone’s experience of a book. I still really enjoyed the book. And I got tired of it in a way that I might not have had I not started it at a time when I was preparing for a total (if temporary) upheaval of my normal day-to-day life. The fact that I was able to power through the last 75 pages literally the day we got home and I was back in my normal reading spot on the couch certainly speaks to that. I am afraid, then, that this might not be the most helpful review in terms of Allende’s novel, but I hope it does encourage you to think a little more about not just what you read but how you read and the impact of your world on your reading experiences.
The Next Book on the Shelf 