DISCOVERIES

PORTRAIT IN SEPIA

By Isabel Allende

Translated from the Spanish

by Margaret Sayers Peden

HarperCollins: 300 pp., $26

“Portrait in Sepia” is the story of Aurora del Valle, a bit of a bodice-ripping name for a 30-year-old photographer recounting her family history, but Isabel Allende’s novels have become progressively more romantic, more lacy and less political since “The House of the Spirits.”

Civil War in the United States and the Chilean invasion of Peru are somewhat one-dimensional backdrops in this turn-of-the-century novel, set in San Francisco and Santiago. The narrator, Aurora, is hovered over (like a marionette with a puppeteer whose hands show beneath the curtain) by a willfully omniscient and somewhat supercilious writer.

Aurora’s maternal grandfather is a Chinese healer in San Francisco; her paternal grandfather is a businessman from Chile with his powerful wealthy wife, Paulina del Valle, the novel’s locomotive, in spite of the fact that much of her time is spent in the bathtub, eating pastries.

When her mother dies in childbirth, Aurora is raised by her Chinese grandfather and his American wife. When her grandfather dies, she is taken to Paulina, a fat Auntie Mame who marries her butler after her husband dies and moves her household back to Santiago.

It’s all very exotic and matriarchal and upper class, like most of Allende’s fiction. But there is less magic in it; less imagination. It is more prosaic and bourgeois. It is a diversion, a tango, a sonata to beauty and money. In some readers, “Portrait in Sepia” will inspire a strange determination not to be seduced; others will give in. Others will wait for the movie.

THE LAST SUMMER OF REASON

By Tahar Djaout

Translated from the French

by Marjolin de Jager

Ruminator Books: 148 pp., $19

Boualem Yekker, the anti-fascist main character of Tahar Djaout’s “The Last Summer of Reason,” “is a man lost between this desert of faith and the paradise of books. Books, his old companions, the saving grace of dreaming and intelligence brought together!”

Yekker runs a bookstore in an unnamed police state run by Vigilant Brothers, who ride green motorcycles and enforce the millions of new laws designed to establish utter conformity of dress, speech and thought among the country’s unfortunate inhabitants.

It is a society spawned by the marriage of ideology and business, a formula designed “to destroy everything that gives rise to pure feeling, to make the world on earth into the dominion of devotion.” Yekker’s family abandons him when he fails to endorse the new regime; he is lectured by hitchhiking ideologues, terrorized by threats and letters and, finally, his store is shut down and taken from him. All in the name of God.

Djaout was assassinated by an Islamic fundamentalist group outside his home in Bainem, Algeria, in 1993. One of his attackers was quoted as saying that he was murdered “because he wielded a fearsome pen that could have an effect on Islamic sectors.” “The Last Summer of Reason,” like Czeslaw Milosz’s nonfiction work, “The Captive Mind,” describes the stages of nostalgia, paranoia and detachment that a tyrannical regime can inflict on the soul of the artist.

MILES WALKER, YOU’RE DEAD

by Linda Jaivin

St. Martin’s: 256 pp., $13.95

“Miles Walker, You’re Dead” is a novel from the art world Down Under. The country of Strayer (capital, Sydney) has been taken over by the Clean Slate government. The policy platform for Clean Slate’s prime minister, Destiny Doppler, is to slash funding for the arts. A painting of a fish should look like a fish; if it doesn’t, the painter can lose his or her license to practice art or suffer a fate similar to that of a best-selling novelist “who had literally to eat her words when the cultural vice squad came pounding on her door.”

Miles Walker is a painter who lives with his friend Zakdot (who aspires not just to have a Web site but to be a Web site) and his bomb-making friend Maddie (whose favorite pastime is downloading new recipes for incendiaries off the Internet). They hate the new government, so when Walker is asked to paint a portrait of Prime Minister Doppler to further his flailing career, they are skeptical, if not irate. He does not tell them that he sleeps with her. These are all virtual chat room-type characters, except for Walker, who is drawn carefully enough to be almost lovable, sometimes too lovable. Jaivin is fast and funny but a little cutesy sometimes: “I chose a truffle with a dark and bittersweet center. Just like me.” If it’s true that irony is dead, as Zakdot is fond of saying, he seems to be the only character who takes anything seriously, and even art is trumped, as he is the first to admit, by the apolitical whims of life.