''Island Beneath the Sea'' ( es, La Isla Bajo el Mar) is a 2009 novel by

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

an author

Isabel Allende Isabel Angélica Allende Llona (; born in Lima, 2 August 1942) is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as ''The House of the Spirits'' (''La casa de los espír ...

. It was first published in the United States by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News ...

.Alexandra Alter, ''Isabel Allende on Superstition and Memory'', The Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2010, p. W4 The book was issued in 2009 in Spanish as ''La Isla Bajo el Mar'', and was translated into English by

Margaret Sayers Peden Margaret ("Petch") Sayers Peden (May 10, 1927 – July 5, 2020) was an American translator and professor emerita of Spanish at the University of Missouri. Prior to her death in 2020, Peden lived and worked in Columbia, Missouri. Early life and ed ...

, who had translated all (except the first) of Allende's books into English. The story is set during the Haitian Revolution.

Plot

The story opens on the island of Saint-Domingue (current day Haiti) in the late 18th century. Zarité (known as Tété) 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 Tété 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 dreams of financial success and is morally unopposed to slavery, though he dislikes punishing slaves himself, instead instructing his cruel overseer, Cambray, to administer the violence. Upon Valmorain's marriage, Tété becomes his wife's personal slave and housekeeper. Valmorain's wife is fragile and superstitious and slowly succumbs to madness. As Valmorain's wife goes mad, Valmorain forces the teenage Tété into sexual servitude, which produces several illegitimate children. Spanning four decades, the narrative leaps between the social upheavals from the distant French Revolution through the immediate chaos of the Haitian Revolution, to a New Orleans fomenting with cultural change.

References

External links

the author's website.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Island Beneath The Sea 2009 Chilean novels Novels by Isabel Allende Novels set in Haiti Novels set in New Orleans HarperCollins books Cultural depictions of Toussaint Louverture Novels set in the Haitian Revolution