Interview with Isabel Allende

An interview with Isabel Allende from Big Think

"I prefer fiction because in fiction I do whatever I want," says Chilean-American author Isabel Allende, who has published 18 books of fiction, non-fiction and memoirs over the past three decades. "Whatever I do is my responsibility and that's it. In a memoir, it’s not only about me; it’s also about the people that live with me. The people I love the most. And I have to ask myself, 'What is mine to tell and what is not mine to tell? Am I invading somebody else's life or privacy?'"

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Isabel Allende: Island Beneath the Sea

Margo Hammond reviews Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea.

History is best told by way of a good story. Isabel Allende provides a whale of a one in her latest historical fiction, "Island Beneath the Sea."
The novel follows the life of Zarita, a slave known as Tete who is the daughter of an African mother and the white sailor who sold her into bondage.
The fictional events take place against very real backdrops -- a civil war and slave revolt in Haiti; revolution, terror and the rise of Napoleon in France; and the Jeffersonian purchase of Louisiana that made New Orleans part of the United States -- but the history never gets in the way of the gripping story.
In just over 450 pages, Allende tracts the 40 years of Tete's life from her birth in 18th-century Saint-Domingue, later known as Haiti, to New Orleans, where she becomes a free woman.

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Isabel Allende: Island Beneath the Sea

Lewis Jones reviews Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea

Island Beneath the Sea, her eighth novel, is a historical romance of slaves and pirates, set on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue and in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, between 1770 and 1810 – the period of the French Revolution, the slaves’ revolt of Toussaint Louverture and the Louisiana Purchase. The heroine is Zarité, known as Tété, a slave girl of mixed race who is raped at the age of 11 by Toulouse Valmorain, her cruel and proud master, and subsequently endures any number of injustices, in which she is sustained by her indomitable character and unshakeable faith in voodoo.

In bite-sized chapters, which become wearisome over such a generous length, the novel presents a world of powdered wigs and bursting corsets, of brutality in sugar cane fields and debauchery in opulent brothels – the many sex scenes are excruciating – into which historical events occasionally barge with the finesse of a muddy prop forward.

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Isabel Allende: Island Beneath the Sea (Reviewed by Gaiutra Bahadur)

Interview with Isabel Allende

John Timpane interviews Isabel Allende.

Isabel Allende, as the world knows, writes her novels in Spanish. She looks translations over, but has "total faith in my translators."

So what, asks the unsuspecting, defenseless interviewer, can she do in Spanish that she can't do in English?

"Love!" she cries. "My husband would find me ridiculous if I tried to pant in English." Then she unleashes a big laugh in all languages.

A jest like that, against type, pointed, seasoned with good humor, holds the key to Allende, 67, one of the most popular writers in the world.

Her new novel, "Island Beneath the Sea" (Harper, $26.99), manages, like many Allende books, to frustrate easy classification.

It begins on the island that became home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Its main figure, Zarite, is born to an African slave who tries to kill her baby (to save her from a terrible life) and does kill herself. Known as Tete, the girl grows up as the slave of French sugarcane magnate Toulouse Valmorain.

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Isabel Allende: Island Beneath the Sea

Gaiutra Bahadur reviews Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea.

In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. So critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her latest novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” which is set partly in late-18th-century Haiti. The protagonist, a mulatto slave named Zarité, is maid to a sugar planter’s wife who gradually goes mad. (The Caribbean seems to have had a reliably deranging effect on women in fiction, from “Jane Eyre” onward.) Even before her mistress’s death, Zarité becomes the concubine of her master, Valmorain, submitting to that role across decades and borders, even when he flees to New Orleans after the 1791 slave revolt.

The resulting canvas contains no less than the revolutionary history of the world’s first black republic as Allende portrays the island’s various factions: republicans versus monarchists, blacks versus mulattoes, abolitionists versus planters, slaves versus masters. She revels in period detail: ostrich-feathered hats, high-waisted gowns, meals featuring suckling pigs with cherries. Her cast is equally vibrant: a quadroon courtesan and the French officer who marries her; Valmorain’s second wife, a controlling Louisiana Creole; Zarité’s rebel lover, who joins Toussaint L’Ouverture in the hills. But for all its entertaining sweep, the story lacks complex characterization and originality. And its style is traditional. Where, you wonder, are the headless men — or, in ­Allende’s case, headless women? Where is the magical realism?

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An excerpt of the book is available at harpercollins.com

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Ilan Stavans reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days

Isabel Allende has recently published a sequel to her popular memoir "Paula," which recounted the tragic death of her 28-year-old daughter Paula Frías, who became ill with the rare blood disease porphyria at the end of 1991. Like its predecessor, "The Sum of Our Days" is structured as a mother's letter to the absent Paula. In it she recounts her life since Paula's death, her artistic hits (the global appeal of her memoir, the making of the Billie August film adaptation of "The House of the Spirits," the research of novels like "Portrait in Sepia" and "Inés of My Soul") and an array of indiscretions (the fertility treatments of a daughter-in-law, the bisexual identity of another one). Seasoned throughout are recurrent dreams, as is fashionable in Allende's work, and recommendations on how to live a happy life amid endless misfortunes.

There's an unavoidable honesty to the narrative, a directness that is likely to hypnotize a handful of readers. Yet at its core the book is soulless, sin alma. The short chapters leap haphazardly from one tale to another, from this relative to that tourist trip to meeting Antonio Banderas, as if the book was nothing but a series of journal entries.

Allende used to be a writer of promise. She came late to the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and 1970s. But once she arrived into the mostly male club (Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, García Márquez), people paid attention. But somewhere in the journey she became a facile, consenting storyteller, ceasing to surprise her audience.

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Miranda France reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

sabel Allende appears to lead a charmed life. The Chilean author of The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna has sold more than 50 million copies of her books and has loyal fans all over the world. Each morning she leaves her Californian home and walks through the garden, past the swimming pool, to the summer house where she writes her novels. That's after her lover has donned a "jaded sheikh dressing gown" and made her freshly ground coffee. Why can't my lover do that?

Of course, where families are concerned, nothing is ever as perfect as it seems. The first few pages of her third volume of autobiography hint at discord in Allende's extended family, which she calls "the tribe". By the end of the book it has been exposed as gloriously dysfunctional, requiring the services of psychoanalysts, astrologers, Zen Buddhists and anger-management consultants, among others. There are three drug-addict stepchildren; a daughter-in-law who becomes a lesbian; another child with fertility problems; sundry affairs and ructions.

Looming over all these concerns is the greatest sadness of all: the death of Allende's daughter at the age of 29, in 1992, from a rare genetic disease. A previous memoir, Paula, took the form of a letter to this daughter as she lay in a coma. The Sum of Our Days is also styled as a letter to Paula, informing her of events in the family since her death.

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Michael Pye reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende minds neing short, and short women are like short men: they take over whole worlds to compensate. She has made wonderfully vital fiction out of the margin between the spirits and the facts of life, she channels the heart of an older generation of popular writers, the generous entertainers, and makes it new. She even reinvented the masked avenger Zorro.

This makes her infuriating to the more po-faced and correct among us because she's an improper Hispanic, maybe a bit too upper class, willing to use the exotic in her background because she knows it fascinates; because she doesn't genuflect before her own name, which she shares with the Marxist icon Salvador, the murdered president of Chile; because she uses so much of what we're meant to take seriously as magical realism just to give us a very good time, and she does it with obvious intelligence.

She also has a personality so strong it rushes off the page, a remarkable presence even in translation (which says a great deal for Margaret Sayers Peden, her regular translator from the Spanish). She's wonderfully self-aware, as when she confesses, assuming we'll think her plain: "Pretty women in my books die before page 60."

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Jackie McGlone interviews Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende does everything in Spanish – she dreams, cooks, yells at her beloved grandchildren when they're naughty and, of course, writes her bestselling books in her native language. "I even make love in Spanish. I would feel a fool panting in English," she says, greedily spooning the chocolatey froth off her cappuccino.
"It is decaffeinated, isn't it?" she asks the waitress in the London hotel in which she is staying on her British book tour. "If I have any more caffeine, I will be like this," impersonating a silken-clad jumping bean. "I am too much that way anyway."

She can say that again. Allende may be tiny but she packs a powerful, passionate punch, both in print and in person. She is, she alleges, a lipsticked Amazon who slays her own dragons.

Although she claims to be jet-lagged after flying from London to Barcelona, with her husband Willie Gordon – for the day for the city's Book Day, when everyone is given a book and a red rose – she looks wonderful. Gamine featured, with an enviably smooth, pale complexion and lively, watchful eyes the colour of dark chocolate, she is a fierce 65 years old, although she sure as hell doesn't look it. Which, knocking on wood, she attributes to good health and incontinent greed.

"I love dark coffee, wine, chocolate, caviar and vodka, rich, spicy food – everything that's bad for you. I don't stint myself."

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Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Sophie Gorman reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende is one of the best-known Latin American novelists (her most famous book The House of the Spirits was a huge international bestseller) who writes in the magic realism tradition. She is part of the Allende family from Chile, which included President Allende, but has lived for years in the US with her extended family. She now has more than a dozen novels to her name but a personal tragedy was the basis for one of her most moving books.

In December 1991, Allende's 26-year-old daughter Paula suddenly fell grievously ill and sank into a coma from which she would never wake up. Devastated as she watched her daughter die, Allende turned to storytelling as a portal to connect her to Paula and as a method to sustain her own dwindling spirit.

The result was Paula, a book of two parts; the first written during the endless hours spent roaming hospital corridors, and the second a few years later when Allende was able to step back to look at her own life, the history of her family and her country, Chile. And Allende's need to sustain her spirit and distract her grief through storytelling has led now to The Sum of Our Days, the latest part of a memoir that began with Paula.

This most personal story is, superficially at least, written as a letter to her dead daughter. It begins with a description of the family gathering to scatter Paula's ashes in a park near Allende's Californian home, where her daughter used to go on romantic walks with her husband, Ernesto.

From this jumping-off point, Allende describes all that has happened since and how life has kept going, almost despite itself. A matriarch to her extending and intricate family, Allende is also someone who experiences life more richly than most, with her every experience overflowing with emotion.

Even her dreams are psychedelic kaleidoscopes and she believes them to give true meaning to her waking life. And she carries her passionate Chilean ideas and ideals of family as a tribe with her wherever she lives.

In this book, vivid descriptions of her husband, children and friends, or her "clan" as she refers to them, are laced with a real sense of honesty and, as she turns her writer's eye inwards on herself too, she certainly doesn't shy away from baring all her own flaws. Alongside the many fights and reconciliations within her extended family that are part of her daily life, she also highlights her tantrums, her see-sawing mood swings and her inability to resist any opportunity to meddle in the tangled lives around her.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Interview with Isabel Allende in The Guardian.

Allende speaks powerfully of her literary inheritance, in particular the influence of Shakespeare. She would draw the characters in a play and then cut them out, making each stand up with a match stick "so I would know what the heck was going on". Reading Shakespeare left the sediment that turned her into a writer, she says. "I love King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. You take just a little piece, even out of context and he's great. When I read it, it wasn't for its literary value. I was entertained by the story."

Her purpose as a writer, she says, is to "convey something and for that I have to trap the reader's attention. If I lose them, then what I write is lost. As a journalist you know that what you write competes with other things in the same paper. Writers often write for friends or critics, and forget readers. I feel the book and characters choose me, and if I allow enough time, they will talk. I ask myself, 'Why am I doing this'? 'Why am I writing about the Gold Rush?' [explored in her book Daughters of Fortune]. Then at the end, I realise I have been exploring something that has been related to me and my life and temperament. It's a book about a woman trapped in Victorian times, trapped in a life and a corset. She decides to confront the masculine world. She has no tools or weapons to fend for herself. She needs to dress like a man, act like a man to survive. Isn't that what my generation of feminists did? Exactly that."

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Ed King reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

In December 1992 Isabel Allende's only daughter, Paula, died after a year-long coma. During the long hours spent at her bedside Allende wrote her first memoir, which she named after and addressed to her unconscious daughter.

In The Sum of Our Days Allende, the great matriarch of Latin American literature, picks up the conversation where she left it, telling Paula how she and her family have spent their time and, most of all, how her life has accommodated the abrupt, grief-induced onset of old age.

The overarching protagonist of Allende's memoir is her vast family in Marin County, California, where she came as an exile from the Pinochet dictatorship and has lived ever since. Like her slightly overwhelming 'tribe', Allende's narrative is sprawling and pleasingly chaotic.

She visits each family member in turn and charts the evolution of their relationships since Paula's death. We meet her lawyer husband, Willie, who campaigns for the rights of immigrant workers and looks quite like Paul Newman; her strictly Catholic daughter-in-law, Celia, who offends everybody with her strident homophobia before running off with a woman called Sally; and her indomitable mother, Abuela Hilda, who 'sees things that are invisible'.

But it's the family's spiritual life that gets the most attention.

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Two new reviews of Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days and an interview.

Thirteen years ago, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende published a memoir, Paula, in the form of a letter to a daughter who lay in a coma. The Sum of Our Days is a sequel, also addressed to Paula, that explains what has happened to the family since her death from porphyria, a rare blood disorder, in 1992. The author, I believe, attempts three things: She defends her use of magical realism as an emotional device, demonstrating how it operates in her everyday life as well as in her novels -- which is fascinating. She explains to her deceased daughter how she has endeavored to merge her family, her second husband's previous wives and children, and various friends and acquaintances into one big "tribe" -- which is puzzling. And she tries, all too plainly, to discredit and diminish her second husband's children -- which is disturbing.

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"Every life can be told as a novel," remarks Allende near the start of this memoir covering the years since 1992 when she lost her daughter, Paula. Written in the style of a long letter to the much-missed girl, this book about the lives of her family is told just like a novel, even beginning with a hook: "I always approach the eighth of January with trembling."

Allende, we learn, uses this date every year to start writing a new book or else risk a year of devastating bad luck. It is her grave preoccupation with superstition, tradition and spiritual enlightenment that colours and shapes this piece of autobiographical writing. The Sum Of Our Days is a book about loss, about healing; but most of all about the dynamics of a close family.

The Sum of Our Days makes frequent references to her dead daughter's spirit, which Allende believes guides her family, answering their prayers and causing good things to happen. Although to the reader this can seem misguided, even irritating, the author's grief-stricken denial of the finality of death is understandable and poignant. Her deep-rooted conviction that the living and the spirit world can interact will come as no surprise to those who read her debut 1982 novel The House Of The Spirits.

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For Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, a mother-daughter bond is something to forge and nurture daily — even after death.

Allende still writes a letter to her mother every day, a tradition that has endured for years. And before her daughter, Paula, died in 1992, Allende exchanged daily letters with both women.

Those letters are the cornerstone for Allende's memoir, The Sum of Our Days, which is a sequel to Paula, a memoir she wrote as her daughter was dying of the enzyme disorder porphyria. The latest installment updates Paula on what's happened to Allende and her family since Paula's death.

The Sum of Our Days begins in a forest where the family has gathered to scatter Paula's ashes. Allende tells NPR's Lynn Neary that returning to that difficult period wasn't hard for her.

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Michael Jacobs reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende's memoir begins with the author lying wide awake on an exceptionally stormy Californian night. She is disturbed not, by the ferocious wind or the rain but, by a superstitious fear. For it is the eve of 8 January, the day on which for the past 25 years she has always begun the writing of a new book. She feels that if she starts on any other day, the work will be a failure.

All this is very typical of Allende, who,, by her own admission, inhabits a world full of melodrama, premonitions, omens and spiritual encounters. Her family history is so extraordinary that she needed to look little further for inspiration for the characters that make up such a fantastical saga as her first, most successful novel, The House of Spirits. Unsurprisingly, as she confesses, such a legacy made her unable for much of her life to separate fantasy from reality.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Aida Edemariam wrote a biographical piece on Isabel Allende.

It wasn't until she had published her third book, Eva Luna (1989), that she left her day job at a school for the disabled, and, for good measure, her marriage. Allende has an unusual willingness to make her private life public. Her website contains a selection of personal photographs; she has written without reservation (though with self-mockery, too) of the way in which she met her second husband, "an Irish-looking North American lawyer with an aristocratic appearance and a silk tie who spoke Spanish like a Mexican bandido and had a tattoo on his left hand" at an event for Of Love and Shadows (1987). Within a couple of weeks she had mailed him a contract detailing her demands, and what she was prepared to offer in a relationship, even though she was "absolutely shocked by the way he lived - by how awful his family was. He had three biological children, all of them drug addicts. How can you have three children, all of them drug addicts? No sense of family, everybody disconnected." He soon found himself the subject of a novel, The Infinite Plan (1993); she found that his often invented Spanglish was creeping into her writing; these days she has her work trawled for linguistic and grammatical oddities.

"If I had to choose between a relative and a good story, I would take the story," she says of the outrage that The House of the Spirits provoked among her relatives in Chile. This tendency produced a 1995 memoir that has been called - with good reason - her masterpiece. It was written at her daughter Paula's bedside, after the 29-year-old had fallen into a year-long coma following complications due to porphyria. Intended at first as a way to fill in the gaps for her daughter when she woke, Paula is furious, grieving, recklessly honest; occasionally, when Allende begins to realise that her daughter will never return, is in fact dying, it is unbearably so. Her mother, who was her trusted editor, was horrified and wanted her to turn it into a novel. Allende tried; it felt wrong, a betrayal of Paula, and she refused.

A year later Gordon's daughter disappeared, presumed murdered. (The oldest child has been in and out of prison his whole life; the youngest, after eight years of heroin, is clean.) It was nearly the end of their marriage. "But every time I mentioned the word divorce, Willie would drag me to therapy. He was determined to keep this thing going. And he won. It was very funny, because I remember once we made a deal that for three weeks we would not mention the word divorce, no matter what. We could kill each other, but that word was not going to be mentioned. And it saved us, because we realised that if you put your energy into solving the problem instead of running away, everything shifts." It was five years before she could write again, and she tested the water with Aphrodite (1998), a book of recipes and aphrodisiacs. She had started Daughter of Fortune (1999), about Chileans in the California gold rush, before Paula fell ill, but didn't finish it for another seven years. It's a sweeping melodrama, full of flashing eyes and pirates and love at first sight.

Allende knows this sort of thing means she doesn't often get reviewed - especially in Chile, where she is nevertheless popular (Inés has been at the top of the bestseller lists since it was published there in August) - but she is defiant. "I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better. But as a journalist you learn that you have a readership, and you have to connect with that readership no matter what. If your readers do not pick up your book and read it, you've wasted your time. I want people to identify with the characters, to know that other people feel the same way. To know that what is happening to them at a particular point - a child dying or something - has happened before and will happen again." Read More

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Chilean Literature

Jenny Cockle interviews Isabel Allende.

My Chile is an idealised country, probably frozen in the 1970s; it's the old country where I grew up. Though I was born in Peru my parents were Chilean diplomats (the children of diplomats always take on the nationality of their parents) and we returned to Chile during my childhood to live in my grandfather's house in Calle Cueto, Santiago. That particular house really marked me. All my memories of Chile are rooted there. I suppose I've created a utopian country in my mind, the one you find in Pablo Neruda's poetry.

I returned to Chile recently to make a film for The South Bank Show. It's a different country now, especially Santiago. If you travel out of the city, you can still find some of the old-style Chilean hospitality and kindness that I remember. But Santiago has grown into a huge city of 6 million people; everybody is in such a hurry all the time, and there are terrible problems with traffic and smog. During filming, we took the funicular up the San Cristobel Hill. Fortunately, it was a beautiful sunny day and there was no smog, so we got a great view of the city. We could see the whole of Santiago.

Yet, in many ways, I think the country has changed for the better. For example, we now have excellent roads, great airlines and trains that run on time; it's a very efficient place. You might be robbed of a gold chain, but generally there's little violence. It's a safe, wonderful place for European tourists to visit.

In 10 years, Chile has lowered poverty from 39 per cent to 18 per cent, which is astonishing. It's a very prosperous country, yet there's still a gap between the very rich and the rest of the country, which I find appalling. There is a small group of billionaires who control the economy living up in the Santiago hills in gated communities. They live in another world. The country was much, much poorer when I lived there. Now, at least, you don't see all the shanty towns that used to surround the city.

Although I visit Chile three or four times a year, my home now is in Marin County, north of South Francisco. I've often said that I don't fit in anywhere but I almost feel at home in California. When I return to Chile I feel wonderful initially because I can speak with my native accent; I get the humour and all the little codes that you truly understand only in a place where you've grown up. I love all of that. Then after two weeks, I need to get out. There's no privacy because people recognise me in the street and although they are very kind, you can't work in that kind of atmosphere.

It's funny that Chileans look like such mellow people, but anything can spark off the terrible violence that's in our history. We descend from the Mapuche, one of the bravest tribes in Latin America. They were pacified in the 1800s but they never surrendered and I think that formed the spirit of the nation.

I've travelled all over the country - to Easter Island and Patagonia in the south and to the desert in the north. Chile is a great destination to explore but it's a long way away from Europe, so you'll need at least two weeks there.

There's not much of interest in Santiago, but about an hour and a half away is the coastal town of Isla Negra, where you can visit the former home of Neruda, now a museum. He was a collector of all kinds of junk. In his day I would have called it junk but now he's dead, it's "a collection". His poetry had a great influence on Chile. People go there to pay homage and some even stand and recite his poems by heart.

But if I were visiting Chile for the first time, I would go south, to the lakes, the forest, the volcanoes and the island of Chiloe, which is actually an archipelago. If I had more than two weeks, I would add the south of Patagonia, in particular the national park, Torres del Paine, which is surrounded by the most beautiful mountains. Fly to the city of Punta Arenas, and from there, drive for six or seven hours into Patagonia until you reach the wonderful eco-tourist park and hotel Torres del Paine. You need to stay for at least five days because there's such a lot to see: glaciers, mountains. It's the most beautiful landscape in the world. My son says the best part of Chile is the desert up in the north around San Pedro de Atacama; I agree that the desert is fantastic, but I don't think it's as stunning as the south.

Many people come to Chile during the summer in Europe or the US, because it's our winter and we can offer great winter sports. There is also some wonderful fishing to be had. In summer, there are lovely coastal towns to visit in the north such as Antofagasta and La Serena. These are picturesque little towns with beautiful beaches, but the water is really cold. In the south there are no real beaches but you can go to the lakes, which are beautiful. It's a wonderful sight to see the volcanoes reflected on the water.

I grew up in an area of Santiago called Providencia, where my parents still live. My happiest times were spent during the time I was living there, when I was working as a journalist on a magazine called Paula. I was young and still in love with my first husband, and we had two small children. We lived in a tiny house. We had no money, but at the time, the country was changing. The three years when my uncle Salvador Allende and his government were in power were so interesting. It was the beginning of the 1970s, with the sexual revolution, great music, hippies...

I stayed in Chile until about a year after the military coup of 1973, and although it was very sad to leave, I had no choice. I just couldn't have lived under Pinochet's regime. So I went to Venezuela for what I thought was going to be a short time - I never quite unpacked - but I ended up living there for 13 years.

Throughout that time, I was always looking south and hoping to return to Chile as soon as we had a democracy again. But by the time we did, I had met my second husband, William, and was living in the United States. I don't think about what my life would have been like if I'd stayed in Chile - you can't think like that. What if I'd stayed in Venezuela?

It feels natural to keep my Chilean history alive in my books. I don't ever say I'm going to write a book about this or that, but I sit down on 8 January each year and something comes to me. My first novel, The House of the Spirits, started off as a letter to my dying grandfather. And my book Paula started off as a letter to my daughter, who had fallen into a coma. I've just written a memoir based on the letters I've exchanged with my mother over many years. So letters are very important in my life.

I still love my work. I love telling stories and I love the silence that the story requires. I'm not a very social person. I'm not introverted or shy, but I enjoy my privacy and spending time alone. When I'm writing, I don't always feel in control because the story has a way of going in totally unexpected directions. As I work, the characters start shaping up in very different ways. People often want a happy ending but I can't do that. It's not about a happy ending or a bad ending; it's just an open ending. Tomorrow things may be different. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Harriet Paterson reviews Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende.

Ferocious Indians and hostile geography were grist to the average conquistador's mill in the early 16th century. The real problem with organising an invasion of Chile was that there was no promise of gold. A disastrous expedition under Diego de Almagro in 1535 led to appalling hardship, many deaths, but worst of all, no treasure.

This makes Pedro de Valdivia, conqueror of Chile, even more pathologically single-minded than his contemporaries. Without the lure of riches, and with the grisly warnings of Almagro's survivors before them, no sensible Spaniard would have attempted another Chilean campaign. With fanatical obstinacy, Valdivia went anyway, lusting for glory, with just 10 soldiers and a group of Yanacona Indians.
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History tells us that Valdivia also took along his mistress, Inés Suarez. This gives Isabel Allende her novel: the bloodthirsty tale of invading the Americas is familiar, but here it is told from a woman's viewpoint.

This should be a fascinating story. It took the invaders a whole year to cross the Andes and the Atacama desert, one of the most desolate places on earth. When founding Santiago, their new capital, in 1541, they faced terrifying numbers of Mapuche Indians, warriors so fearsome that even the powerful Inca had failed to subdue them. Six months after the settlement was built, the Mapuche razed it. To withstand all this, Suarez must have been quite a woman.

Unfortunately for us, she knows it. As protagonist and narrator, she is insufferably self-satisfied, listing her achievements without a shred of irony. She hectors the hapless reader with her skill as a lover, her wise decisions, her astounding courage, wit, political nous and so on. She chops her enemies' heads off, she makes great chiefs turn and run. Along with the Indians, she kills our sympathy stone dead.

The narrative meanwhile suffers from flashback fever, jumping to and fro as Suarez looks back over her life. Major outcomes are anticipated without ceremony, whisking tension out from under the main storyline.

Despite lashings of gore, the book remains a bloodless affair. None of the characters ever quite lifts off the page. Even Allende's magic realism is a ghost of its former self, with a dead husband showing up to no dramatic effect. Somewhere in the transition from Allende's obviously extensive research to the novel, a riproaring story of ambition, venality and ruthlessness has sadly lost its guts.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Elaine Ayala interviews Isabel Allende.

From her Marin County home in San Rafael, Allende — who, as niece of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, lived for a while in exile, traveled the world as the stepdaughter of a diplomat, and was once fired from her job as a book translator for changing endings to better reflect women — spoke with flair and humor about her life and work.

Q. Your main figures are strong women. Are they ever weak in your world?

A. More than strong, they dare take a risk. They feel that they don't belong. They're poor and have no place in the establishment. Most of my strong heroines make terrible decisions. They're so stubborn. They have to have extraordinary lives. Weak people don't make good characters. They make good former spouses.

Q. What were your favorite books as a child and young adult?

A. I grew up in a house full of books and in an adult world. There was no censorship and no special books
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for kids. So by age 9 or 10, I was reading adult books. The works of Shakespeare was the first book my stepfather gave me. The first time I read it, I couldn't keep track of the characters. So I drew them on pieces of cardboard, and I moved the characters around. Then I could understand the plot. I knew nothing of the language. The same thing happened a little later with Russian novels. Then (as a teen) I started reading a lot of science fiction. I read the Latin American writers later because they were not available until then.

Q. Why?

A. Many of the great writers were writing in their own countries and were being published by local publishers. The works stayed in the countries. In Spain, Franco censored all Spanish writers. So Barcelona publishers were looking for (Spanish-language) writers and found this well of incredible literature in Latin America. They exported books back to Latin America. Among them was Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Donoso, Octavio Paz. All the great writers of the boom. Twenty of them at least were published in Barcelona.

Q. Name some of your favorite contemporary books?

A. I read three or four books a week or more. The latest is by Khaled Hosseini who wrote "The Kite Runner," which has been on best-selling lists. He wrote another novel called "A Thousand Splendor Suns." This is what I have on my desk this very minute. Tomorrow I will have other favorites.

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Chilean Literature

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Natasha Walters reviews Isabel Allende's Inés of My Soul.

Isabel Allende's early fiction, particularly The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna, had an emotional warmth about it that readers found hugely compelling. Together with the fey twists and turns of magical realism - which you either love or you loathe - her ebullient inventiveness led inevitably to comparisons with García Márquez.

Some of her latest work, however, has not been so successful, and for me, this novel dips to a new low. Here, Allende is working with historical reconstruction, and perhaps it is the constraints being laid on her imagination that make this such a lumpy, indigestible read. I'm not qualified to say how far this tale of the 16th-century consort of Pedro de Valdivia, conqueror of Chile, accords to the historical record, but I'd guess that it stays pretty close. Yet although dates, names and battles may be in place, the work of bringing the events to life has eluded Allende. The Inés Suárez who narrates the book is not a person, but simply a cloak of rhetoric thrown over a series of historical happenings, and her almost supernatural abilities - to seduce, cook, heal, dowse for water - while never actually magical, are never actually convincing either.

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Latin American Literature

Ines of My Soul, by Isabel Allende

On 11 September 1541, people living in central Chile rebelled against the bearded "viracochas" who had recently established a fortified settlement called Santiago. Though the viracochas had arquebuses and horses, the warriors organised by the local leader Michimalonko were cleverly drilled. The governor of the fledgling city was tricked away by news of armed bands elsewhere. Michimalonko's men attacked, and almost destroyed Santiago.

This uprising is one of many set-pieces in Isabel Allende's new novel. Yet in her description of the 1541 uprising, she mentions the otherwise superfluous date of 11 September three times. For a Chilean living in California, it is imbued with significance: the date of Pinochet's overthrow of Allende in 1973, and, of course, 9/11. Working out its significance in Allende's story of the conquest of Chile becomes fundamental to understanding her brilliant novel.

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Chilean Literature