I Lived on Butterfly Hill by Marjorie Agosín (review)

Celeste lives a charmed life in the house on Butterfly Hill—one of many hills in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso—with her physician parents, doting nanny, and Jewish abuela, who came to Chile as a refugee years ago to escape Nazi rule in Austria. When a military coup wracks the country, Celeste’s socialist-leaning parents become public enemies, which requires them to go into hiding and the eleven-year-old to be sent to stay with her aunt in Maine. Celeste spends three years as an exile, learning English and making friends despite her ever-present sense of displacement, and when she’s able to return to Valparaíso, she continues journeys both external (going in search of her parents) and internal (finding how she can contribute to rebuilding her homeland). Agosín makes the interesting choice of rewriting Chilean history—the left-leaning president deposed is not Allende but a fictional Alarcón, and the Pinochet-inspired nameless dictator is ousted after a mere three years—a deviation from historical fact that connects younger readers with political crises and elicits empathy for the refugee. There are elements of magical realism in the way the setting of Valparaíso takes on a character of its own, and black and white mixed-media art with delicate sketchy lines and moody grayscale tones both breaks up text and enhances the setting’s evocation of a utopia marred. The poetic language is dazzling and insightful (“Sometimes remembering means to live a moment in the past again, and in that way survive the present”), making this a breathtaking read for audience up to the lengthy page count and emotionally driven narrative.