The book deals with a vivid 100-year-story that contains surviving a pandemic, the great depression, loss of familial wealth, political upheavals, marriage problems, estrangement and eventual peace.
[3][2] Violeta was born in 1920 amid the Spanish flu epidemic in an unnamed South American country on a stormy night.
[2] Violeta references personal and political upheaval spanned over decades, including the coups and military uprisings and similar horrors of 1970s which seemed to encapsulate the whole of South America.
Her son is a journalist who has come into the government's Black books because of his career; he winds up fleeimg to seek asylum in Argentina and then in Norway.
[5] The New York Times hailed Violeta as "a feminist awakening amid twin repressive forces, the state and the domestic sphere, in passages whose sheer breadth is punctuated by sometimes stilted, explanatory dialogue".