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: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Patrick R. Chesnut reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

There’s only one question more agonizing than “You go to Harvard?”, and that’s the inevitable follow-up: “What are you studying?” Say English or Hist and Lit and watch admiration turn to disappointment as eyebrows furrow to let you know that, at best, you’re wasting your abilities, and at worst, you’re wasting your life. Literature, we’re told, is a nice, even necessary diversion, but it’s not real life.

Roberto Bolaño begs to differ. As a young man, Bolaño gave up everything to pursue a life in poetry, believing that one should take poetry as seriously as he takes life, that if the author lived what he wrote, the reader would live it, too. This absurd, desperate, noble idea is at the heart of “The Savage Detectives,” a book so good that it is not only its own justification, but a justification for literature itself.

Due in large part to this novel—the 1998 winner of the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize, now available in an English translation by Natasha Wimmer—Bolaño, who died in 2003, became known as the most important and influential novelist in the Spanish-speaking world, a writer mentioned in the same breath as Borges and García Márquez.

Unlike the other demigods of the literary canon, though, Bolaño seems like a guy you could meet on the street, not a monument cast in bronze. This is the lifelong iconoclast who dropped out of school at 15, stole the books he read, attended poetry readings only to shout down those he disdained, and led an outlaw band of avant-garde poets. This is the life he idealizes in “The Savage Detectives.”

The semi-autobiographical novel begins with a series of journal entries by Juan García Madero, a 17-year-old law school dropout who falls in with a group of poets calling themselves the “visceral realists” (the fictional counterparts to Bolaño’s “infrarealists”). García Madero becomes deeply involved in their bohemian lifestyle but is eventually forced to flee Mexico City with the group’s leaders, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (fictional stand-ins for Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago), as they seek to escape the violence that haunts them and to find a ghost from the past.

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Chilean Literature

Boyd Tonkin writes about Spanish literature at the London Book Fair.

In literary terms, the British market may well rank as the terrain of hard-headed Sancho Panzas rather than high-minded Don Quixotes. All the same, it has hosted plenty of leading Spanish writers over recent years. Whatever one feels about the artistic merits (or otherwise) of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, that labyrinthine Barcelona potboiler managed to sell a Richard-and-Judy-assisted seven-figure total in English - almost unprecedented for a translation.

Mid-market blockbusters and mysteries from novelists such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Almudena Grandes, Enrique de Hériz and José Carlos Somoza (the latter pair both Earl's Court visitors) appear at regular intervals. Elsewhere, we can enjoy such outstanding talents as Manuel Rivas, Juan Marsé, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Cercas (winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Soldiers of Salamis) and the absurdly gifted Javier Marías, who is shortlisted for this year's Independent prize for the middle volume in his "Your Face Tomorrow" trilogy, Dance and Dream.

And this is not to mention that crucial cohort of Spanish-domiciled writers who have Latin American origins. The posthumous leader of this pack remains Roberto Bolaño, raised in Chile but based in Catalonia for many years until his death in 2003. His stock across the Hispanic world now stands Andes-high. This spring, a collection of stories from Harvill Secker (Last Evenings on Earth) and an epoch-making novel from Picador (The Savage Detectives) should make this ever-rising star shine a little more brightly over here.

So, in the perennially thin soil of British translation, Spanish fiction achieves a breadth - if not depth - of coverage with few counterparts in other European cultures. In general, this is a healthy trend. Broad-appeal romps, epics and sagas have a part to play in cultural exchange, just as towering literary landmarks do. However, publishers can take this welcome naturalisation of the foreign text just a shade too far.

Fans of bravado with brains will relish the latest volume to appear here in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's "Captain Alatriste" series of Dumas-style swashbuckling adventures. The Sun over Breda (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99) sends Alatriste and his daredevil comrades to Flanders in 1625. There they face down the Calvinist rebels - and their cocky English allies - and reveal the chaotic reality behind Velázquez's suspiciously serene painting, "The Surrender at Breda". It would, no doubt, be in poor taste to say that the rip-roaring finale reminded me of the aftermath of a make-or-break Champions League tie.

Pérez-Reverte in this mode is always more than just a doublet-and-dagger yarn-spinner. The Sun over Breda deftly touches on the fabrication of history out of memory, myth and propaganda as it delivers its pleasantly reeking cartload of genre shocks and spectacles. That makes it even more of a puzzle that I can find no mention of his trusty translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, in the British edition of this book. Does the publisher really think that Anglophone readers ready to enjoy the English team getting thrillingly minced by a last-minute Spanish comeback will take fright at the sight of a translator's name? Pardiez - shame on the lily-livered house of Weidenfeld!

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Spanish Literature

Book Review: The Sun over Breda by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Erik Spanberg reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Sun over Breda.

"The Sun Over Breda," the third installment of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's delightful series of swashbuckling novels, once again focuses on the reluctantly heroic Captain Alatriste, a mercenary in the Spanish Army and a sword-for-hire in 17th-century Madrid.

This time out, the narrator is Inigo Balboa, a teenager taken in by Alatriste as a favor to a fallen comrade. He recounts the horror and drudgery of a protracted Spanish military campaign in Flanders and offers an extended meditation on a subsequent art mystery. The latter centers on Diego Velazquez's "The Surrender of Breda," a painting which may or may not have included Alatriste amid the high-ranking officials depicted in it. Balboa, meanwhile, remains awed and baffled by the taciturn captain.

The story glides between witty sonnets and nods to Cervantes and the hardened truths and miseries of siege and battle with ample vanity, unrequited romance, and personal rivalry added for good measure. Soldiers contend with lice, gaping wounds, confused battles, empty purses, and poor rations. Boredom and lack of action provide little respite, either. As Balboa reminds the reader, "Fear and watchfulness are bad companions to repose." Once again, Balboa and Alatriste remain good companions to dashing literary fun.

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Spanish Literature

Book Review: Touchstones by Mario Vargas Llosa

Jason Wilson reviews Touchstones by Mario Vargas Llosa.

The South American liberator Francisco de Miranda warned us to "trust no man over the age of 40 unless you can be sure he is fond of reading". Despite standing in Peru's presidential elections and deriding Castro, Grass and many others, you can trust Mario Vargas Llosa, another kind of liberator, as a reader.

Touchstones, the name given to his regular, syndicated column that literally touches on everything, is a follow-up to Making Waves (1996), also edited and serenely translated by John King. These essays are a novelist's account of the world as he sees it. Few would question Vargas Llosa's utterly believable fictional worlds. He documents carefully, has a perfect ear for register and slang, and plot and narrative techniques merge to baffle the reader's anticipations. His language does not draw attention to itself in its creation of imaginary worlds, and he brings this enviable clarity to his journalism.

However, there is a loss of intensity in these wide-ranging essays. It could be that Vargas Llosa has conceptualised his thinking before writing so that there are areas that function as a shorthand for complex processes, like the "truth of lies". He assumes that reading is always a vicarious experience; that it's therapeutic to abandon the self and live through others. This thinking doesn't figure in the fiction.

So these more intellectual essays reveal a reasonable writer who makes sense through low-key narratives about the real world. A large section is devoted to his account of a visit to Iraq in June 2003, with his daughter. What convinces here are the stories he hears, the incidents, the mindless destruction; not his ideas. At the outset he opposed the invasion; this journalistic foray changed his opinions as he learnt first-hand about life under Saddam.

Even more impressive is how Vargas Llosa starts from a cosmopolitan Peruvian position, often in critical dialogue with Paris, so that his range of references astounds readers more attuned to national traditions. Just listing the novels that he re-read while campaigning for the presidency in 1990 is a lesson: Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, Mrs Dalloway, Nadja, La Condition Humaine, Tropic of Cancer and six more. In that list, there's only one Peruvian novel.

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Peruvian Literature

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Richard Eder reviews Roberto Bolaños "The Savage Detectives"

Mr. Bolaño has given his novel an odd tripartite structure. The first part, narrated by a young would-be poet, tells of his initiation into Belano’s Visceral Realist movement (a hit off the magic realism of García Márquez and others) and some graphically visceralist sex. It ends with his departure from Mexico City by car with Belaño, another writer, and Lupe, a prostitute fleeing her pimp. Belano is seeking traces of Cesárea Tinajera, a poet who long ago belonged to a similar movement and went off to the Sonora desert in the 1920s.

Skipping to the third part: the party searches through a dozens of desolate Sonora hamlets. Belano’s (and Bolaño’s) visceral realism means evoking the obscure and humble — the children of darkness — while pillorying the children of light who flourish in the precincts of art, power and wealth.

Eventually the searchers come upon Cesárea, who dropped her writer’s scrim to join the viscerally real world, harsh and extravagant by turns. Successively she had taken up with a bullfighter, taught school, sold herbs at country fairs and now, grown enormously fat, works as a village washerwoman. We read of a vengeful pursuit by Lupe’s pimp, and a bloody showdown where Belano becomes a knife fighter.

Bulking between these two moving parts — one an amiable but distracted ramble; the other a tense, implacable advance — is a 400-page middle section, more than twice as long as the others put together.

Narrative stops. Or rather, giving way to many dozens of mini-narratives, it replaces forward motion with a kind of tour, the kind Dante took of the Inferno. In this instance it is a tour of characters and attitudes in a Mexican literary scene that is a fools’ carnival of futility; one that Bolaño uses to suggest a more general futility of such scenes in Latin America and beyond.

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Chilean Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Laura Axelrod reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

The most striking quality of Daniel Alarcon's book, "Lost City Radio," is the depth of artistry in his prose. This is a book that is not only meant to be read, but also experienced.

It begins in a South American country, at a radio station deep in a war-torn city. A young boy appears with a list of those missing from his village. He is told to look for the host of a radio show about missing people. Perhaps Norma will read his list on the air and villagers will be reunited.

The reasons for the war are unstated. What the rebels believed is never made clear. This intentional vagueness leaves readers to focus on the effects of the war - the random disappearances, ID checks and spying, the lost people.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Las Soldaderas by Elena Poniatowska

Martin Winchester reviews Elena Poniatowska's Las Soldaderas.

Women in combat may seem a recent phenomenon to some, but to students of the Mexican Revolution the role of women in battle has long since been known. For nearly a century, though, these soldaderas have been buried deep in the background of nostalgia, far behind more recognizable figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

Celebrated Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska brings these heroines of history to the forefront with a summary of their contributions accompanied by an impressive collection of black and white photographs in Las Soldaderas.

The term soldadera originates from the word for the salary soldiers paid female servants to carry out domestic chores while they were in camp, on the road, or away in battle. Gathering firewood, making tortillas, and making sure gunpowder didn’t get wet quickly turned into actual fighting as the male casualties climbed and the ranks of revolutionists were depleted.

The book brings to life some of the most impressive participants of the Mexican Revolution.

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Mexican 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

Although a bit off-topic here's a review of Milan Kundera's The Curtain where he tells of an encounter with Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar in Prague.

During a conversation with a French acquaintance he is eager not to let his account of life in Prague under Soviet surveillance dip into the syrupy sweet “aesthetic evil” of kitsch. As the dominant style in the 19th century, kitsch was understood by Central Europeans as the tyranny of over-blown Romanticism. Kundera describes an episode that could be found in one of his novels: an apartment swap with a womanizing friend that befuddles the Soviet spies as well as the friend’s multiple lovers. The ensuing icy response to the light treatment of a heavy subject is chalked up to the Frenchman’s own distaste for the vulgar, his nation’s equivalent of kitsch. The two men are held apart not by their respective native languages, but by a cultural barrier that is deeply engrained within their national literary consciousness. As an antidote to this story of national differences Kundera describes a memorable encounter with Latin American writers, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar, when the trio visited Prague in the early days of the Russian occupation. “We would talk and a bridge—silvery, light, quivering, shimmering—formed like a rainbow over the century between my little Central Europe and the immense Latin America; a bridge that linked Matyas Braun’s ecstatic statues in Prague to the mad churches of Mexico.” For Kundera, the experience of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude moves from a free-flowing appraisal of magical realism, into an analysis of historical and social continuities between two countries traumatized by centuries of invasion.

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño's review roll. Suddenly the reviews started popping.
Charles Oberndorf reviews The Savage Detectives and Amulet.

In 1998, Roberto Bolaño's novel, "The Savage Detectives," galva nized a Hispanic literary world mired in magical realism. In the nine years that followed, the novel's reputation only grew, and its author, who died in 2003, nearly has been deified. Natasha Wimmer's very fine translation finally brings the work to readers of English.

First of all, "The Savage Detectives" is a masterpiece, but unlike other postwar masterworks, it doesn't proclaim its importance right away. "The Tin Drum," "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Midnight's Children" all open with strong narrative voices and linguistically rich sentences.

"The Savage Detectives" opens in the voice of 17-year-old Juan Garcia Madero, and all the narrators that follow speak in plain language. Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie board their characters on history's train and send their protagonists directly out into pivotal moments of their country's history. Anton Chekhov is the Russian ghost who hovers over Bolaño's shoulder, as his characters walk ordinary city streets, history being the abyss just below the surface.

Bob Thompson reviews The Savage Detectives.

So here's what you're up against if you're an American publishing house like Farrar, Straus and Giroux trying to persuade readers to shell out $27 for the first English translation of Roberto Bolaño's nearly 600-page novel, "The Savage Detectives," just out this week.

You've got to introduce them to an author of indeterminate nationality of whom, it is safe to say, 99 percent of Americans have never heard. The Chilean-born Bolaño spent most of his adult life in Mexico and Spain; he liked to call the Spanish language his homeland.

You've got to sell the book in a crowded market notoriously resistant to literature in translation. You've got to sell it without benefit of author interviews in newspapers or blogs, on television or NPR, because your author isn't around to do them: Bolaño died of liver disease, at 50, in 2003.

Most important, you've got to explain why the heck readers should want to spend large chunks of their scarce leisure time in the company of Bolaño's scruffy, combative protagonists: two obscure poets who, in the novel's key plot juncture, leave Mexico City for the Sonoran Desert -- pursued, as it happens, by an enraged pimp -- on a quest to track down an even more obscure poet from a previous generation. Bolaño never portrays the marginal lives and literary passions of the pair directly. They are glimpsed, instead, through the retrospective testimony of more than 50 narrators who have, however briefly, encountered them.

Thomas McGonigle reviews The Savage Detectives.

Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives" is a deeply satisfying, yet overwhelming reading experience. Ostensibly about two poets and their search for another poet who has mysteriously disappeared, the novel becomes nothing less than a broad portrait of the Hispanic diaspora, spreading from Central and South America to Israel, Europe, Africa and every place in between, from the late 1960s through the 1990s.

Bolaño, a Chilean novelist and poet who died in 2003, is not entirely unknown in the United States. Three previous works of fiction have been published in English to wide acclaim — a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth," and two novels, "By Night in Chile" and "Distant Star," that are short, obsessive monologues set during the bleak days of the Pinochet regime in Chile. But, before going on, let's be honest. You may have noticed a little detail in the book information above that stopped you: 578 pages. You and I — time-bound creatures that we are — may share the same question: Is this novel worth our commitment?

To answer, consider the score of voices that make up "The Savage Detectives." We hear from poets, prostitutes, revolutionaries and lovers, and aging editor-poet Amadeo Salvatierra, who recalls for us a long visit by two friends, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, years ago. It becomes clear that they are the detectives of the title, and that "savage" refers to their ragged youth. On that visit, they are accompanied by a few other artist friends — they call themselves the "visceral realists" — all looking for poet Cesárea Tinajero, the group's inspiration.

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Chilean Literature

Book Review: Delirium by Laura Restrepo

Maya Muir reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium.

Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo's new book, "Delirium," poses as a mystery: Why has Bogota beauty Augustina Londono gone mad, and how did she come to be found delirious in a room at the Wellington Hotel?

The answers unfold within four fractured narratives of three generations of the Londono family and the people around them. Clever revelations, withheld to the final pages, provide answers. But Augustina, the reader discovers, has always been a little unhinged like her grandfather before her, and the mystery adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Also Augustina's delirium simply -- but conveniently -- fades without much reason at the story's end.

The more-interesting delirium Restrepo delineates is the drug-corrupted society of 21st-century Colombia. A character describes Bogota as "this city where everyone's at war with everyone else." Random bombings and kidnappings occur daily; the countryside is punctuated by zones so dangerous that the military withdraws by midafternoon each day; and the social elite have become eager puppets of the drug lords.

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Colombian Literature