This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. SIEGEL: This is NPR, National Public Radio.Ĭopyright © 2005 NPR. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. SIEGEL: The book is "Zorro" by Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
It also makes for a great couple of swashbuckling evenings keeping company with this entertaining book. If this isn't the stuff of legend, I don't know what is. Here, our hero, pursued by his nemesis Moncada and dedicated to the struggle against injustice, writes his own story in sweat, blood and tears and signs it with a neatly zigzagged letter that he marks with his sword in the flesh of his enemies, Z for Zorro. The action proceeds across northern Spain and then back to the New World, to the Caribbean, pirates included, New Orleans and California once again. He also falls madly in love and makes an enemy for life in the person of Rafael Moncada, his rival for the hand of the beautiful Juliana de Romeu, daughter of his Barcelona patron.įrom that point on, his adventures rise to new heights. There, in the midst of the struggle between the Napoleonic occupiers and Spanish resistance fighters, de la Vega learns a great deal about politics, war and love, becomes initiated into a secret Spanish society dedicated to the rights of the underdog and transforms himself into Zorro, the sword-wielding, whip-slashing Fox, and leads some successful forays against the forces of reaction. When he turns 16, his father ships him off to Barcelona for an Old World education. Son of a Spanish father and Shoshone Indian mother, de la Vega grows up on the Spanish mission in Monterrey and becomes steeped in the lore both of old California and okahue honor, justice, respect, dignity and courage, the positive values of the indigenous peoples. The narrator of Isabel Allende's novel fills us in on the birth and early life of Diego de la Vega, later in life known as El Zorro, or the Fox. It brings to life the legendary romantic hero known as Zorro. The latest work of fiction by Isabel Allende takes us back into early 19th-century California and Spain.
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