In September 1972, just a year before his death, Pablo Neruda invited thirty-year-old Isabel Allende, then a modest celebrity in Chile as a television and magazine reporter, to visit him at his seaside home at Isla Negra. A gracious host, Neruda praised her humorous pieces, telling her that he even photocopied them and showed them to friends. For her part, as Allende recalls in her memoir Paula, she "made meticulous preparations for that meeting; I bought a new recorder, wrote out lists of questions, I read two biographies and reread parts of his work--I even had the engine of my old Citroën checked so it would not fail me on such a delicate mission." Alas, unbeknownst to her, the feckless mission was doomed from the start:
After lunch it began to rain; the room darkened. . . . I realized then that the poet was weary, that the wine had gone to my head, and that I must hurry.
"If you like, we can do the interview now," I suggested.
"Interview?"
"Well, that's why I'm here, isn't it?"
"Interview me? I'd never put myself through that," he laughed. "My dear child, you must be the worst journalist in the country. You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do, I suspect you're not beyond fibbing, and when you don't have news, you invent it. Why don't you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are virtues."
Indeed they are. And fortunately, Isabel Allende ultimately followed Neruda's advice: A decade later, she turned from journalism to fiction, and since then has acknowledged her meeting with Neruda as "a turning point" in her life. Equally fortunate for her readers--and especially pertinent to the contents of Conversations with Isabel Allende--she has "put [her]self through" hundreds of interviews in the last dozen years, a period that has witnessed her meteoric rise to the status of leading female literary voice from Latin America and best-selling female writer in the world.
The appearance in late 2001 of Allende's major novel, Portrait in Sepia, closed out the trilogy that began with House of the Spirits and marked the publication of Allende's ninth book. It became a top best-seller, as in the case of all her fiction. Indeed, Allende's books have topped the best-seller lists in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, selling an estimated eleven million copies in thirty languages (including pirated editions in Turkish, Vietnamese, and Chinese); her first two novels, The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows, have already been filmed. Indeed, as several interviews in this volume make clear, in one sense Isabel Allende has merely switched roles since the distant day of her fateful meeting with Pablo Neruda: she has gone from celebrity interviewer to celebrity interviewee.
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Isabel Allende is a disarming and often hilarious interview subject--and her humor, which is seldom remarked on by critics of her writing, is on full display in her interviews. For instance, she confesses her "passion" for writing, declaring that she prefers it over all other activities. Then she pauses: "Well, what I like most is making love! But then second: writing. Writing too!" Later, in a more serious vein, she responds to a question about critical assessments of her oeuvre: "I don't know how to answer in an intelligent, academic, scholarly way. I can only tell you how I feel. I write [my work] with feelings. . . ." (see no. 5).
Or, as a character in Eva Luna remarks about the art of stories and storytelling: "If you start analyzing them, you ruin them."
Although Allende's experience with and sophistication toward the role of interviewee have increased as the occasions have multiplied through the 1990s, her fundamental openness and straightforwardness as an interview subject are apparent in all the conversations in this volume. Such a collection is a kind of "biography on the pulse," both corresponding closely to the dominant events of the moment in her life and serving as a running history of her rapidly changing circumstances between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. As such, it is an invaluable complement to Paula, amounting in toto to an informal self-portrait that sheds further light on Allende's life and art: another, quite different and more spontaneous, oral form of storytelling by a master storyteller.
Or, as Allende herself puts it in a 1994 interview, explaining that her interviewing skills from her journalism days have proven indispensable to her as a fiction writer, and that she still occasionally conducts interviews to enrich her settings and enliven her character portraits: "Through interviews you can come up with things that you will never find in a book."
The same is sometimes true about Allende's life, as the interviews in Conversations with Isabel Allende testify. They variously provide biographical details, extended self-interpretations, or glimpses into states of mind and feeling not contained in Allende's own books: e.g., her heady life in the early 1970s as a Chilean celebrity, her struggles with anger and perfectionism, and her spiritual awakening in the aftermath of her daughter's death in 1992. Thus, the interviews collected here supplement and complement Paula, sometimes filling in "gaps" not addressed in the memoir or even (as yet) transmuted into art in Allende's fiction.
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But should we take everything that Allende says in her interviews at face value? Paula was released as "fiction" in Germany and the Netherlands; and perhaps even Allende herself is unsure of its genre. As she remarked of Paula in one prepublication interview: "It's a sort of memoir. I think it's nonfiction; however, it reads like fiction." And Allende issues the interviewer a warning:
If you ask me to tell you my life, I will try, and it will probably be a bag of lies because I am inventing myself all the time, and at the same time I am inventing fiction, and through this fiction I am revealing myself.4
Caveat lector!
Let us heed that warning and, rather than approach an Allende interview as prosaic journalistic reportage, conceive it as a literary genre in its own right, featuring "Isabel Allende" as protagonist (see no. 6). For Allende is not only drawing on memory and expressing opinion, but also engaging in imaginative acts of self-transformation: they are part of the performative repertoire of a prose fabulist and unprosaic romancer.
Indeed, Allende's mythic sensibility--or mythomania (or "bag of lies," as she calls it)--is part of her Romantic sui generis project of endless self-reinvention--whereby even her confession about "lying" may itself be a "lie": still another of the tale-teller's telltale tricks. Implicitly confirming Pablo Neruda's judgment of her, Allende has readily admitted to interviewers her irresistible urge to embellish, recalling her experience in a Santiago publishing house as a translator of Barbara Cartland-style romances:
I changed the dialogue a little bit at the beginning so that the heroine wouldn't be so stupid. Then I changed the plot a little bit. By the end, I had the man helping Mother Teresa in Calcutta and the heroine selling weapons in Algeria!
Allende sometimes gives different interviewers different versions of major events in her life--versions that also differ from her account in Paula. One example: her "different stories" of how she first met her second husband, William (Willy) Gordon, which range from her jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge to save him from drowning to her walking up to him at a restaurant table and asking him to dine with her. Or, as Allende puts it in Paula, speaking of her first night of lovemaking with him: "I am tempted to invent wild erotic rites to adorn my memoirs, as I suppose others do, but in these pages I am trying to be honest." Still, she adds: "We can invent memories that fit our fantasies. . . . [Paula's death] has given me this silence in which to examine my path through the world . . . to recover memories others have forgotten, to remember what never happened and what still may happen."
So Allende's claim that she is indeed the Latin American Scheherazade--"In a weird way, Eva Luna is me or I am Eva Luna" --should thus be taken not just as biographical testimony (Eva Luna--C'est moi! Or ¡Soy yo!). It is also yet another warning to the unguarded or ingenuous interviewer. As Eva Luna herself puts it: "One word from me and, abracadabra!, reality was transformed."
Should Conversations with Isabel Allende itself, therefore, be classified as "fiction"? Acknowledging the relevance of the question, the careful reader may, I think, suspend an answer and move on to enjoy Allende's performance as interviewee. Whatever their genre, the interviews in this volume offer, at a minimum, rich insight into the evolving self-images of Isabel Allende as storyteller, fabulist, exile, writer, memoirist, woman, wife, and mother. I hope that they will also assist the scholar-critic's understanding of the relationship between Allende's life and work--and meet the general reader's desire to know more about the lives of authors: the author as heroine in her own life drama. The interviews in this collection address both of these purposes: they enrich our appreciation of the autobiographical aspects of Allende's art and reveal the woman behind the literary characters.
Organized chronologically by date of publication--to highlight both the development of Allende's literary career and the evolution of her political and social thought--the eighteen interviews in Conversations with Isabel Allende divide themselves roughly into four periods.
The first period covers the mid-1980s and is represented by a pair of literary interviews by well-informed scholar-teachers of Latin American literature, both of whom are frank admirers fascinated by Allende's rise to international success. Living in exile in Venezuela during this period, Allende published La casa de los espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits, 1985) and De amor y de sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows, 1987).
A second group of interviews spans the late 1980s to 1991, which might be termed the "Eva Luna years." These years witnessed the publication of Eva Luna (1987; Eva Luna, 1988) and Cuentos de Eva Luna (1989; The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991) and coincide with Allende's second marriage in 1988, her relocation to San Rafael in California, and her transition to American life. Interviewers' questions during this period turn increasingly biographical, now that Allende has become not only a literary celebrity, but also an American resident.
A third phase of interviews opens in 1992, and it continues until the mid-1990s, with emphasis on Allende's relationship to her daughter Paula, the appearance of El plan infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan, 1993), and the publication of Paula (1994; Paula, 1995). In this period, interviewers focus above all on Allende's relationship to Paula, who died in December 1992 of a rare metabolic disorder. Quite often, the interviews from these years are not just biographical but frankly personal, even intimate; Allende reveals that she wrote Paula, a mother's heartrending memoir about her existence before and after her only daughter's death, partly to assist other families who have suffered similar overwhelming losses--and that she regards the sharing of herself in her interviews and public engagements as a chance to aid her readers.
Finally, a fourth stage of interviews emerges in 1995, as Allende returns from her book tours for Paula to her San Rafael home and attempts to cope with the enormous loss of a daughter's death. Allende fears that she may never write again--or, at least, never write fiction again. Ultimately, she recaptures her lust for life and regains her literary gifts by writing another work of nonfiction, Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisiacos (1997; Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998). Its bawdy mix of food and sex whets her creative appetites. She breaks through her writer's block and writes a swashbuckling epic in the form of a nineteenth-century historical romance, Hija de la fortuna (Daughter of Fortune, 1999), which immediately becomes a best-seller. Her own fortunate recovery is complete when the novel is selected by TV host Oprah Winfrey as the March 2000 selection for Oprah's Book Club. Allende quickly follows it up with the third and final epic novel in the "Spirits" trilogy, Portrait in Sepia, whose success incontrovertibly establishes Allende's re-arrival as a major international literary figure.
1984-1987: A Latin American Literary Celebrity is Born
Isabel Allende's first book, The House of the Spirits, created an immediate sensation on the international literary scene in the early 1980s, and by the time of its German translation in 1984 and its English edition in mid-1985, Allende's novel had occupied the best-seller lists in Spain and Latin America for more than a year. In the United States, it was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and given a royal welcome by the New York Times: "With this spectacular first novel," began Alexander Coleman in his rave review, "Isabel Allende becomes the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists." During these years--the early and mid-1980s--though she traveled frequently and even accepted a guest appointment for a semester's teaching at Montclair State College in New Jersey, Allende was still living in Venezuela.
As the New York Times review suggests, the American as well as European press took immediate note of Allende: author profiles in Spain's El País and Germany's Der Spiegel led to major feature stories in American weeklies such as People; Vogue, the American women's magazine, even serialized chapters of The House of the Spirits. Because most of the interviews from the mid-1980s were conducted by academics and published in literary or scholarly journals, however, the literary interview--rather than the personal or celebrity interview--predominates, with questions focusing on the imaginative worlds of The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows, or the relationship between the novels and Allende's family history.
Broadly speaking, two related themes pervade interviews from this first period of Allende's reception: her status as a successful female writer and as a relative of former Chilean president Salvador Allende.
For instance, in the opening interview in this volume, Allende herself emphasizes that one of her major goals is to write to and for women--and as a Latin American woman. Speaking to Marjorie Agosín, a Chilean-born poet-critic and professor of Latin American literature at Wellesley College (see no. 1), Allende emphasizes the femininity of her feminist characters: "I chose extraordinary women who could symbolize my vision of what is meant by feminine, characters who could illustrate the destinies of women in Latin America." Noting that The House of the Spirits had already been reprinted twelve times by 1984 in its original Spanish edition, Agosín asks probing questions about Allende's family background and literary imagination, so that her interview serves as an excellent introduction of the novelist to her growing international public.
Conducted in 1984, Agosín's in-depth interview--which was translated into English even before the publication of the novel in English--is characteristic of the expertise exemplified by scholar-interviewers in the mid-1980s. Here, in the Agosín interview, as well as in subsequent conversations, Allende discloses the autobiographical dimensions of The House of the Spirits as she reminisces about her childhood in her grandparents' home and reflects on how her maternal grandmother served as the model for Clara del Valle in The House of the Spirits. Nor is Allende reticent here about making political pronouncements, predicting that "Pinochet and the evil ones who are with him" represent merely "an accident in the long life of my country. They will go into history as a misfortune that darkened the sky, but they will go."
Such political statements constitute the most controversial elements of Allende's interviews during the mid-1980s, which were conducted before the 1988 plebiscite that removed General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte from power in Chile. In these interviews, Allende's ideological/feminist critique of Latin American power politics revolves around a cluster of attributes, among them "feminine solidarity," the "military mentality," and machismo. Commenting on themes that soon would be apparent in her second novel, Of Love and Shadows, Allende elaborates on these interconnections in an interview published in 1986: "I have two obsessions, two recurrent phantoms: love and violence, light and darkness. . . . They are always present in my life like two antagonistic forces." Allende asserts here that her "natural tendency" is "toward socialism." As a member of "a privileged social class," she insists, she feels "a double responsibility" to campaign for social justice.
As Allende became a more visible figure in the United States, above all in American university departments of Spanish and Latin American literature, and also a more available one--especially after ending her twenty-five-year marriage to Chilean engineer Michael Frías and publishing Of Love and Shadows in 1987--U.S. interviewers addressed themselves to Allende's political responsibilities deriving from her dual status as an Allende family member and a now-famous woman writer. Increasingly, interviewers cast her not just as a feminist voice but as a spokeswoman for Latin America. Challenged in 1987 by two conservative student journalists to advise U.S. youth on how to approach Latin American culture and politics, she replies: "Try and be open-minded . . . because I'm a very intolerant person. I have only become tolerant after suffering. And probably you will never suffer that much."
As this pronouncement suggests, Allende occasionally rose to the invitation extended by her interviewers to speak as a political authority or Latin American voice. The line of interviewers' questions discloses how utterly Americans were fascinated, from the very outset of her literary career, both by the Allende surname--which functioned as a brand-name tag to endow her with the aura of Revolutionary by Blood Connection--and by her conception of the political legacy she had thereby inherited. The glow from Allende's family heritage radiated outside left-wing academic and political circles into the literary sphere, where, by the mere fact of her being an "Allende," critics and reviewers occasionally treated her with awe, lavishly praising her work as comparable to that of Cervantes, James Joyce, and Edith Wharton, not to mention Gabriel García Márquez. Or they approached her as if she were the incarnation of Salvador Allende himself, a phoenix arisen from the ashes to hurl down verbal thunderbolts on the murderous Pinochet tyranny.
Most academic interviewers did not treat her with such awe. Quite accurately, they presented her as the newest addition and only woman in the "exclusive male club" of first-rank Latin American writers of the postwar "Boom," a literary movement whose members combined realism and fantasy to produce what became known as "magical realism" (e.g., Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa). Unfortunately, especially in later years when journalists have subjected her to variants of the "celebrity" interview, many interviewers' questions tend to cast Allende less as a serious writer than as a "personality"--a famous exile, the "niece" of a fallen Marxist hero, the first and only woman writer in Latin America who has ascended to international prominence, or the only Latin American feminist writer who has employed magical realist techniques to depict her continent's history.
It is an index of Allende's "star status" that dozens of popular periodicals--such as Vanity Fair and People--have published celebrity profiles of her. Because such interviews usually cover the same ground, only less substantially, as do those in the literary and scholarly quarterlies, I have omitted them from Conversations with Isabel Allende. But these celebrity profiles have undoubtedly widened Allende's appeal and rendered her more accessible to a vast international reading public. Whether deliberately or not, such celebrity interviews--given that they typically portray her as larger than life, interpret her story against the backdrop of the great historical sweep of her real-life drama, and narrate her chronology as if it were the saga of The House of the Spirits--have helped confer upon her an outsized, even mythical image that the scholars and serious readers too have had to confront.
It also bears noting that, in the literary interviews in this volume, Allende frequently addresses the topic of her public image (see no. 4). Already by the mid-1980s, Isabel Allende was known not just as Latin America's leading female voice, but in some circles--quite exaggeratedly--as a socialist (or even quasi-Marxist) spokeswoman and feminist revolutionary.
The interviewers' comparisons between Allende and the Latin American Boom writers also reflect, however, the interesting topic of her literary debts and writing habits. Allende conducted several extensive, searching conversations on these matters during the mid-1980s. Speaking with an interviewer in Caracas in 1986, Allende addressed the influences on her of García Márquez, of the family sagas of writers such as Russian-born Henri Troyat, and of Neruda. Asked whether she is "bothered" by the frequent comparisons between her first novel and García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970)--an analogy soon to be so relentlessly voiced that it would indeed annoy her in later years--Allende says, "Not in the least. I admire him. I love him dearly."
In the mid-1980s, Allende also reflects, with mixed emotions, on the new impact of literary fame on her work life. Feeling both excited and ambivalent, she acknowledges that she is starting to get frequent invitations to travel, and that this involves the challenge of balancing writing against other activities. "Literature is like love, a full-time occupation. It does not accept distractions." Allende also discusses her workmanlike, journalistic sensibility, noting that she has no fear of writing blocks. And she mentions work habits that she applied during the composition of Of Love and Shadows--habits that continue to intrigue her interviewers to the present day. Among them are what she terms her "research method"--clipping bizarre stories from newspapers and popular magazines--and her self-admitted "superstition" that January 8, the date on which she began composition of The House of the Spirits and thereafter started to write all her books, is her "lucky day" (see no. 3).
And here too, as yet another Allende interview crosses self-reflexively into the subject of interviewing itself (e.g., no. 6), Allende stresses the importance of interviewing to gather "research" for constructing her fictional universes. To write The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows, she made use variously of letters to her mother, old diaries and notebooks of her grandmother's, journalistic articles and recordings from her days as a reporter, and conversations with fellow Chilean exiles in Venezuela.
While following Neruda's advice and becoming a novelist, therefore, Allende nevertheless has also remained a journalist--and even an interviewer.
1987-1991: The Eva Luna Years
"I try to live my life as I would like . . . like a novel," says the title character of Eva Luna, a TV soap-opera heroine, near the novel's close.
Eva's creator has often said that her own life resembles a novel--or, indeed, a magical realist telenovela (soap opera). Never was this truer than in the annus mirabilis of 1988, when the plot twists and character changes in Isabel Allende's own dramatic life took a radical new turn--and world events impinged, oddly and yet again, on her personal history. "Out of Venezuela" might serve as a suitable title for a memoir of Allende's life during these years.
How much Allende maintained a "narrative control" over these narrative leaps is hard to say, but fueling the headlong changes was her love life: Ironically, just a few months before the Chilean plebiscite of December 1988 that ended Pinochet's rule--and which would have facilitated Allende's return from her self-imposed exile to Santiago--she fell in love with William Gordon, a San Francisco attorney. Although she could easily go back home now and live in a more hospitable political climate, surrounded by her extended family and old friends, her life suddenly seemed elsewhere--in California, El Norte. Choosing love over politics, she married Gordon in July 1988 (after sending the lawyer "a contract, listing all my demands, and the few concessions I was willing to make"--and giving him twenty-four hours to think it all over). And then, Allende--despite her publisher's worries that her imaginative juices would desiccate in California suburbia (see no. 3)--resolved to build a new life in the United States as a writer, wife, and stepmother of Gordon's two young boys.
Allende's relocation to the United States ushered in a second, more biographically oriented phase of interviewers' concerns. This shift was also induced by the Spanish publication in 1987 of her third novel, Eva Luna. Prompted by the similarity of Allende's own whirlwind romance to her title character's epic love adventures and storytelling gift, critics soon dubbed the author the "Chilean Scheherazade." Allende's life at this time changed radically, and the focus of interviewers' questions altered accordingly. This period--which I am terming the "Eva Luna years"--featured numerous explorations of Allende's relationships to her characters, especially Eva Luna herself, and reflected the international acclaim in 1989 through 1991 that greeted the appearance of Allende's first story collection, The Stories of Eva Luna. Approaching her work as "woman's writing," interviewers highlighted her treatment of the complex relations between feminism and femininity. American press interviewers--no longer were most of her interviewers Latin American literature specialists--hailed her work as much for what it said directly to Americans, especially to women (who comprise Allende's chief audience, as she herself notes in these interviews), as for its relationship to Latin American politics and history.
Because her transition to American life was so hectic and her professional and family responsibilities so many, Allende did not immediately attempt to write another novel, but rather limited herself to stories, which could be written in short bursts of concentration. She began writing the exotic tales that eventually would form The Stories of Eva Luna. Permanently settled in the United States, she now also felt that invitations to teach and lecture in the United States did not greatly interfere with her work; during 1988-1989 alone, for instance, she taught at the University of Virginia, Barnard College, and the University of California at Berkeley. One also notes her increasing comfort with English during this period; after 1990, even with native Spanish speakers, she conducts most interviews for English-language publications in English, preferring to speak English rather than have her words translated from Spanish.
A central theme in Allende's interviews is the consequence of her new American life for her international status as a Latin American voice. In a Mother Jones interview in late 1988 (see no. 3)--conducted when she was halfway to completion of The Stories of Eva Luna--Allende identified three major practical changes in her daily life entailed by her move to the United States, all of which posed immediate and significant challenges for reorganizing her work life: her new role as a suburban housewife and mother, without the benefit of the inexpensive live-in household help that she enjoyed in Santiago and Caracas; her sudden accessibility to the American media and academy; and her "split life" linguistically, i.e., as a day-to-day English speaker and Spanish author.
Allende chose to stress the last two issues, seeking to transform them into opportunities: More consciously and deliberately than before, she would embrace the role that fate had granted her and address Americans on political and social issues. She would step up to the world stage and, standing on the raised platform of literary fame, speak out on the topic of "politics and the writer" in a Latin American versus North American context.
One representative example is her statement in the immediate aftermath of the 1988 Chilean plebiscite. Asked if she has "something special" to say to U.S. readers, Allende replies:
Yes. You do not live in a bubble. You are not privileged. You are very spoiled. You think you will be saved when this globe explodes. You will not. We all share the same planet; this is a rock lost in space. We are all parts of it. There are no superior races. . . . [Latin Americans are] not [living on] another planet. They are not on Mars. It's our planet. It's our land, and these borders are just illusions. We trace them on a map, but they don't exist. We all share the same planet. (no. 5)
Or, as she declared to a left-oriented U.S. interviewer in 1991, responding to a comment that the American public suffers from a Disneyesque outlook whereby everything always must have a happy ending: "The attraction of Disney is undeniable. . . . I have been living in the U.S. for three years and what I really miss about my Latin American culture is the sense I had there of belonging in a common project, of being part of a coherent group, with a common set of values. . . . Due to our history we have a sense of fate, or destiny, that the U.S. lacks."
Such political outspokenness has elicited sharp and sometimes condescending rebukes, especially from a few conservative critics, who deride Allende's politics as black-and-white and simplistic. It is easy to see how her summary of the history of the Pinochet regime could contribute to such dismissals: "All the violence, repression, and brutality came from the military. And the people responded with nonviolence, pacific protests, solidarity, and organization." But Allende is unfazed by critics' hostility toward her work, whether political or literary. Responding to charges that her work is kitschy, she says: "What do I do with my truth? I write it" (see no. 5). Indeed, she even goes so far as to run through a dismissive catalog of her critics' complaints:
Contradictory things are said all the time. I couldn't please everybody, and I shouldn't even try. . . . One "bad" thing people say is that I discovered a very attractive mixture of melodrama, politics, feminism, and magical realism and I throw it all together. . . . Another "bad" thing is that I'm very sentimental and that I'm not detached, I'm not cold; therefore I can be very kitschy, very campy sometimes. What other bad things can I remember? Oh yes, that it resembles García Márquez. (no. 3)
Despite her cooperativeness with individual critics, Allende makes it clear that she takes a dim view of them as a species:
Critics are terrible people. They will label you no matter what, and you have to be classified. I don't want to be called a feminist writer, a political writer, a social writer, a magical realism writer, or a Latin American writer. I am just a writer. I am a storyteller.
Allende acknowledges in interviews after 1988 that her transition to American life has put her at a mental as well as a geographical distance from political events in Latin America. But she holds that "exile" yields literary advantages. In general, exile is advantageous for a writer, Allende believes, precisely because it generates imaginative space and multiplies perspectives--and because one learns to "understand that your roots are within yourself." Allende herself possesses a "double perspective" by living in the United States and writing from her Latin American past; she says she now has a valuable distance from both places. Another advantage of "exile" is, however paradoxical it may sound, the upheaval it creates in one's life. Allende says that her own crises have shaken her complacency and made her a more questioning, self-aware person and artist (see no. 14).
Not only U.S. but also Latin American interviewers have addressed the topic of Allende's adaptation to life in California. Indeed, it is interesting to see the changing response of selected Latin American interviewers to Allende after her relocation to the United States. In some cases, they begin to look upon her less as one of their own than as a cultural mediator and spokeswoman for U.S.-Latin American relations--i.e., they start to treat her much as did the American press in the early 1980s. For example, asked for her opinion on such nonliterary topics as the future of Latin America, Allende says that the continent has an important role to play in the evolving "collective consciousness" of the world.
Related to the Latin American motif during this second period of Allende interviews is the topic of her feminism and what might be termed her "personal mythology." The publication of Allende's two Eva Luna books gave both U.S. and Latin American interviewers the opportunity to explore Allende's fantasy life as a real-life Scheherazade, a spinner of magical Latin American stories. Interviewers therefore express curiosity not only about Allende's family background, but also about her powerful and compelling identification with her autobiographical heroine, Eva Luna.
As we have already seen, Allende freely acknowledges that she identifies with Eva Luna. She has often described how she used to read stealthily what her family ordained to be "forbidden literature"--above all, the Arabian romance A Thousand and One Nights--all of it stashed in her stepfather's closet in Beirut, which was off-limits to her. (In Eva Luna, the heroine herself carries a copy of the romance with her, deeming it "essential baggage for my travels through life," and The Stories of Eva Luna begins and ends with quotations from A Thousand and One Nights.) To several interviewers, it does indeed seem as if Allende's tumultuous life were a seamless story, reality transformed; i.e., from reading about Scheherazade as a girl to becoming the "Chilean Scheherazade" as an adult woman.
Allende is well aware that her image as a humorous, ironic Scheherazade accounts in part for her tremendous international following, particularly her high standing with educated American women. Diffidently yet forthrightly, she explains that her U.S. popularity is "partly due to the great interest that there is here for women's literature," partly attributable to the Anglo-Saxon and Northern European fascination with magical realism, and partly because her work is not "baroque" and is therefore "easy to read in comparison to other Latin American novels"--all of which has led to her books being "read and studied in universities."
By 1991, Allende had published five best-sellers in twenty-seven languages. Asked later to explain her phenomenal international reception, Allende generously, and with a touch of humor, attributed it to her excellent translators, whom she credits with improving her books (see no. 13). (Allende's regular English-language translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, is a close friend.) Commenting on her popularity in Germany and Scandinavia, where her books have consistently topped the best-seller lists, Allende jokes:
There's nothing much to do, after all, in Oslo or Hamburg except read!
The northern [European] countries generally like my books more, except Britain. . . . If I were living in Germany or Scandinavia, I'd be a national celebrity. Most of my royalties come from there. I'm really popular there.
Why? Probably because they think Latin America is exotic--and with Germany, it probably also helps that there were close ties during the Communist era between East Germany and Chile. I sign copies of my books for German booksellers--four thousand copies. People in Germany read books! (no. 13)
While interviewers of the early 1990s are chiefly concerned with the topics of Allende's feelings in the present and her adjustment to U.S. life, they also plumb her past more deeply than in the previous decade. Much of the curiosity stems from the simple desire to know who Allende was before she metamorphosed--Abracadabra!--into the Eva Luna of San Rafael and began weaving her Scheherazade-like fantasies.
Where did this extraordinary woman come from? readers now wanted to know. Some interviewers, therefore, concentrate on Allende's background, inquiring about Allende's Chilean days, i.e., the years before her international celebrity; for example, they inquire about her writing before the 1973 coup, including her activities as a playwright. Or they address her participation as a contributor to and staff member of publications such as Magazine Ellas and Paula, the latter of which was the first Chilean publication to address taboo social topics such as abortion, divorce, and drugs; and also her involvements with the children's magazine Mampato and her TV programs and short films. Already at the age of twenty-nine, in 1971, Allende had a much-discussed play, El embajador ("The Ambassador"), performed in Santiago, along with a play titled La balada del medio pelo ("The Parvenu's Ballad"). These interviewers showcase the wide variety of expressive gifts that Isabel Allende had developed long before her rise to prominence with La casa de los espíritus, especially those theatrical and literary activities that she herself would later discuss in detail in Paula.
The main outcome of the "Eva Luna years" for Allende herself was that she came to feel more comfortable with herself as a woman and as a writer. As she confides in a 1988 interview, the writing of Eva Luna vouchsafed her "a new attitude about being a woman": "I had to finally accept that I was always going to live in this body with this face and be the person I am." And she had taken significant steps to confront and cope with her "anger" toward her grandfather and the oppressive patriarchy of her Chilean years (see no. 3). In a 1991 interview, she speaks of an "enraged intimacy" between herself and her maternal grandfather (the model for Esteban Trueba, the family patriarch of The House of the Spirits). "We never agreed on anything but we adored each other. I saw him every day while I was in Chile, until 1975." She had also refused to take her husband's family name because of her anger. "My anger towards male authority . . . continued even after my marriage. And it endures even today." This is another topic that Allende takes up at greater length after Paula's death (see no. 14).
Allende also affirms that Eva Luna led to her self-acceptance as a storyteller--and to her conviction that a "storyteller" could be a respectably professional creative writer. With Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna--and just as she is starting to write The Infinite Plan--Allende finally judges her apprenticeship as an imaginative writer to be over. With increasing confidence, she speaks out on a range of literary topics and discusses her own evolution as a writer. Responding to interviewers' concerns, she admits her strong admiration for the work of Borges and Cortázar, rebuts critics' speculations that she deliberately parodied García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, acknowledges the subtle achievements of experimental novelists such as Carlos Fuentes and Manuel Puig even as she defends her realistic plots and traditional fictional forms, concedes the admittedly limited capacity of writers to affect world events, and replies to feminist critics who find her female characters stereotyped or weak. She also admits in a 1991 interview that life in an English-language environment is affecting her writing: "My sentences are shorter, there's less ornamentation, fewer adjectives. The language is more straightforward, and . . . the text is more restrained." Working on The Infinite Plan in 1991, Allende notes that, as she has switched from Latin American and Caribbean settings in her first four works of fiction to a California setting in The Infinite Plan, she has moved away from magical realism to a more straightforward literary realism.
One final comment of Allende's about her writing merits emphasis here, a comment that leaps out at the reader and makes it seem as if, once again, Allende's life of upheaval were a seamless story that reflects a storyteller's careful design. As though Allende were anticipating her daughter Paula's tragic fate and her own decision to write Paula partly to cope with the loss, she speaks in May 1991--fully five months before Paula falls ill and is hospitalized, and with no awareness of her daughter's impending sickness--about writing (in the characterization of her interviewers) as an "act of remembering to forestall death." Thus does the topic that will dominate interviews of the mid-1990s arise explicitly here for the first time: spirituality. "I believe that there is a spirit, a spirit of life in everything that surrounds me," Allende says. "I try to be in touch with that" (no. 6).
1991-1995: Paula and the Beyond
But the spirit of death was to envelop Isabel Allende and her family first. On December 8, 1991, while attending a Barcelona book party for the publication in Spain of El plan infinito ("The Infinite Plan"), she received word of a cataclysmic event that would alter her life abruptly: her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Paula, who had fallen sick on December 6 and entered a Madrid hospital, had slipped into a coma. Paula would die precisely one year later to the day. Like Alba in The House of the Spirits--who followed the advice of the spirit of her grandmother Clara, and wrote to "survive" the ordeal of her rape and her family's anguish--Allende coped with Paula's death by heeding the counsel of her mother, who told her: "If you don't write, you'll die." Allende explains of the note-taking that led to Paula: "I was not thinking of publishing . . . my only goal was to survive; that is the only time that I have written something without thinking of a reader."
The interviews from this third period focus on Allende's personal life and on her loss of Paula; even the interviews conducted before the 1994-1995 appearance of Paula devote attention to Allende's loss. Indeed, given that Allende's two books during this period are based on her husband's life (William Gordon is the model for Gregory Reeves, the protagonist of The Infinite Plan) and on Allende's relationship to her daughter, it is unsurprising that interviewers highlight Allende's roles as wife and mother. What emerges is less the outsized heroic, even "magical realist," portrait of the feminist and socialist in the mid-1980s, or the exotic Chilean Scheherazade of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but rather a more subdued, humanized figure.
Put another way, it is as if we see Allende close up in this most recent round of interviews, rather than against the giant mural of Latin American history or through the gossamer fantasia of Eva Luna. The mid-1990s mark what might be called the "family period" of Allende's interviews. Some of these interviews have a familiar, even confidential, tone, making them truly "conversations"; more so than in earlier years, we encounter the private woman behind the public persona. Allende says several times in these interviews that the death of her daughter had "changed" her; one interviewer remarks that Allende's recent experience had "erased all the unnecessary barriers that separate human beings." During my own interviews with her in April and May 1995 (nos. 12, 13, and 14), I found Allende to be a noticeably different woman--more reflective, less goal-directed, more self-revealing, less guarded--than I had in my earlier interview, conducted in 1988. At fifty-two, Isabel Allende seemed suddenly to have taken a mystical turn--and discovered a new "House of the Spirits."
And with that discovery have come "lessons" that Allende has drawn from the harrowing year of Paula's sickness: the words destiny, trust, acceptance, and openness come up again and again in her interviews after Paula's death. Indeed, the whole cast of her conversation shifts to the spiritual realm:
Life is like a very short passage in the long journey of the soul. It is just an experience that we have to go through, because the body has to experience certain things that are important for the soul. But we shouldn't cling to life and the world so much: we shouldn't cling to the material aspects of the world, because you can't take them with you. You will lose them no matter what. (no. 9)
Throughout her book tours of 1994-1995 to promote Paula, Allende spoke about learning to "let go" (see no. 14). As she put it in one interview: "When I said, dead, [Paula's death] became real and I could deal with it" (no. 8).
Elsewhere Allende has spoken of another, more mundane, "death," or form of "clinging," with which she also still copes: literary ambition. "Ambition is like a bottomless pit," Allende says. After the publication of The House of the Spirits, she "had the sensation that I had done something in my life and I could now die in peace," but soon the hydra-headed monster returned to haunt her: "One becomes ambitious and wants more and more."
Asked in other interviews to sum up what she has learned as a result of Paula's passing, Allende makes her spiritual discovery even more explicit:
Your approach to the world is different. . . . You become more detached. . . . You gain a sort of spiritual dimension that opens up completely your world. (no. 10)
***
I've asked myself countless times: Why her? Why her and not me? If I pray, maybe it will happen to me and not her--that's sometimes what I thought. I asked, Why didn't she die at the beginning? Why did she stay for a year in a coma?
It was tragic, but I learned a lot in that time. It would have been much easier if she hadn't fallen into the coma. The pain was much greater because she stayed a year.
Because Paula stayed, I learned a lesson. My destiny was to lose a child. . . . I did all I could to save Paula, and I could not protect her from her condition and from the world. I believe we are not just body and mind. We are spiritual too. . . .
I'm less passionate now. . . . I've already changed a great deal. I'm letting things happen more, not forcing them. I'm not as goal-oriented as before. . . . I used to live a great deal in the future, with plans and dreams and goals. But I came to realize that life is now. (no. 12)
Or, as Allende put it in another interview, "I finally understood what life is about; it is about losing everything. Losing the baby who becomes a child, the child who becomes an adult, like the trees lose their leaves. So every morning we must celebrate what we have."
Allende is speaking about learning a different kind of exile--a leave-taking of the temporal world--and it seems that she is approaching the sense of peace and acceptance implied in the words told to Eva Luna just moments after the death of her mother: "Everyone dies, it's not so important."
For Allende, the death of Paula eventually became both all-important and "not so important." The contradiction is only apparent: it is a paradox resolved by surrender and acceptance. Allende closes Paula on a note of affirmation: "Godspeed, Paula, woman. Welcome, Paula, spirit." Paula Frías had merely gone to her spiritual home, joining those intrepid women who govern the Trueba mansion--or, even better, those beneficent ghosts that watch over them.
But perhaps Allende's spiritual turn has not occurred quite so suddenly as it might appear, nor been precipitated by Paula's death alone. For Allende was already discovering in her fiction the "lessons" that the harrowing year of 1991-1992 would bring home conclusively. Indeed the lessons from Paula's death that Allende draws in her interviews--destiny, trust, acceptance, openness--are all thematized (though treated somewhat skeptically) in the quasi-New Age evangelical Christianity propounded by preacher Charles Reeves in The Infinite Plan. (Allende borrowed the title from that of a book written by her new husband's itinerant-mystic father, upon whom the character of Charles Reeves is based.) Reeves proselytizes and peddles "The Infinite Plan, or the Course That Will Change Your Life," a package of lectures designed to put the recipient in tune with "Cosmic Forces." Listeners flock to Reeves, and are "comforted by the certainty that their misfortunes [are] part of a divine plan, just as their souls [are] particles of universal energy." And indeed, when Allende speaks in the interviews about "karma" and "fate," it is as if she is sometimes quoting Charles Reeves--but this time sincerely, not ironically or parodically. It is as if she were preparing herself for the news about Paula--and the writing of Paula.
"I believe that there is a destiny. I also believe that you can do much to modify it," Allende remarks in one interview. And so she ultimately comes to an opposite conclusion from that of her protagonist, Reeves's son Gregory, who says at the novel's close to the Allende-like author-narrator:
I realized that the important thing was not, as I had imagined, to survive or be successful; the most important thing was the search for my soul. . . .
[I never imagined] that one day I would meet you and make this long confession. Look how far I've come to reach this point and find there is no infinite plan, just the strife of living. . . .
I have the impression that Isabel Allende might today say instead: "Look how far I've come, only to realize that there's more to life than the strife of living--there may even be some infinite plan!" I find her openness to a change of heart in matters of the spirit both courageous and refreshing.
Allende's "courage" resides, I think, precisely in her heightened awareness and commitment to relinquish tight self-control and open herself to the possibilities of a providential design beyond her own will. And such a change does seem to be one of "heart" rather than "head"--or rather, a form of growth reflecting a greater capacity to connect her heart and head. For, by the time of composing The Infinite Plan, Allende already seems to have possessed the cognitive ability to recognize the existence of an infinite plan; Gregory Reeves reports that the Allende-like author-narrator had countered his chastened conclusion that "there is no infinite plan, just the strife of living," with words of hope: "Maybe . . . maybe everyone carries a plan inside, but it's a faded map that's hard to read and that's why we wander around so and sometimes get lost."
Allende's courage and openness have also extended to a greater capacity for self-disclosure about her private demons. Fearlessly yet modestly, she now abandons reticence in her interviews and discusses her struggles to renounce perfectionism, to nourish intimacy, and to silence her stern, unrelenting conscience and "inner voices" of authority.
I've always been a very demanding person of myself and in some ways that tendency only increases when I perform well and have a great success, because then I expect even more of myself. I want to do even better the next time.
. . . . Despite everything I've said about learning to let go after writing Paula, I still struggle with this critical voice inside me. It has to do with my drive to succeed and the way in which I've increased my demands on myself.
. . . . A lot of it has to do with my upbringing.
. . . . I now see that my upbringing is the source of my success, but it's also something I need to grow out of. I want to let go of some aspects of great responsibility and independence that are linked to a reluctance to trust. (no. 14)
In Allende's interviews of the mid-1990s, readers gain a deeper understanding of the paradoxical woman behind the work: a woman who, though private, likes to be seen and noticed; who luxuriates in solitude yet possesses a flamboyant, extroverted sensibility and lives life intensely; who is a careful planner yet glories in the moment; who has a steadiness and an iron will dedicated to work, and yet also a spontaneous emotional life and a tendency to act on impulse; who has a shrewd pragmatism and keen sense of responsibility, and yet is ruled by passion and does not wait for life to happen, but rather provokes her destiny.
And yet: What also about the other Allende--the writer behind the woman? How has she been affected "after Paula"--and after Paula?
"All sorrows can be borne," Isak Dinesen is said to have written, "if you put them into a story or tell a story about them." In advising Allende to write about the agony of Paula's dying, Allende's mother seemed intuitively to have grasped Dinesen's insight--and indeed, writing the story of her confrontation with Paula's death has not only led to her spiritual transformation, but altered her experience of writing. The most telling change, she notices, is that she finds herself enjoying the activity of writing more and worrying less about the literary "product" (see no. 14).
Before, I always wanted things to get done. Fast and well. I always wanted a finished book. I wanted to come to the end and to have something. Now I enjoy the process far more. I've discovered in a much deeper way the joys of writing itself. I've really learned to enjoy writing, which means to enjoy living and being present to it. . . .
. . . . Rather than focus on the finished product, I'm enjoying each moment in the process. . . .
Nothing will ever be more significant than this loss. And now I know: I could die tomorrow. (no. 12)
In several interviews of the mid-1990s, Allende is, understandably, in a backward-looking, pensive mood--not only because she is discussing Paula, but also because she has built a substantial body of work, six books in a dozen years, an oeuvre that she feels drawn to assess, especially now that she has learned to grant herself the honorific title "writer." Summing up her first decade of literary development, Allende told one interviewer that "each one of my books corresponds to a very strong emotion." She associated The House of the Spirits with "longing," a desire to recapture a lost world; Of Love and Shadows with "anger" in the face of the abuses of dictatorships; and Eva Luna with "accepting myself, finally, as a person and a writer."
The early and mid-1990s were also a time for Allende to reflect in her literary interviews on both her vocation as a writer and her literary successes and shortcomings. Implicitly conceding the force of some critics who found the politics of her second novel intrusive, Allende says: "If I were to write Of Love and Shadows again, I would do it differently. It is not subtle enough and I feel it is too direct." Although she says that it is easier to be a woman in the United States than in Latin America, since the feminist movement has advanced farther in the United States, Allende tells her feminist critics: "I don't invent characters so that they serve as models for radical feminists or young women who want to be feminists, but I simply tell how life is. Life is full of contradictions." More extensively than before, she also discusses the autobiographical background of The Infinite Plan, particularly the similarities between her second husband, William Gordon, and the novel's protagonist, Gregory Reeves. Gordon served as the "model" for Reeves, who "is a survivor. In real life Willie is too. . . . The people who bend but never break are always fascinating to me" (no. 8).
In the aftermath of the American publication of The Stories of Eva Luna in 1991, Allende was often asked about her plans to write more short fiction. She tells one interviewer that she's not going to write any more short stories. "I would much rather write a thousand pages of a long novel than a short story." And also: "I'm scared of short stories, very scared" (no. 8). Allende confesses that she has difficulty writing "erotic" scenes. "Every writer of fiction," Allende asserts, "should confront these three challenges: write short stories, an erotic novel, and children's literature." Allende has already written a story collection and a children's book; although she has certainly written several erotic scenes in her fiction, and devoted an entire work of nonfiction (Aphrodite) to sex and food, the challenge of the erotic novel remains. "I really would like to write erotic novels. Unfortunately, I was raised as a Catholic, and my mother is still alive, so it's difficult. However, I feel that there is a part of me as a person that is extremely sensuous and sexual" (see also no. 8). As so often, Allende's tone is overtly quite sober--and yet also slightly playful. The reader is not certain how seriously to take her--which is doubtless the way she wants it.
A related topic that engaged interviewers was Allende's response to the film versions of The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows. Unlike many reviewers, Allende admired and enjoyed both productions.
I loved the movie of The House of the Spirits. It's not a Latin American movie, but it works as a story. The problem is that people think it's supposed to be exotic. The director [Bille August] went to Uruguay and Chile, but the film doesn't have a Latin American feel. . . .
Of Love and Shadows was a hugely successful movie in Latin America. It was filmed in English because of the big English-language market, but the accents of the characters are very strong. . . . I think it's a great movie. (no. 13)
Another, more personal, reason why Allende probably enjoyed the films so much was that, unlike the critics, she was less concerned with the artistic excellence of the adaptations and more engaged with her own flights of imagination unleashed by her contact with the film's star actors. Allende's statement to one interviewer on seeing the film version of The House of the Spirits attests again to her necromancer sensibility:
Now the fiction has replaced the real story of the family, and we live this sort of fantasy that these things happened. When I saw the movie, I realized immediately that the fiction of the film is ten times bigger than the fiction of the book. Very soon, we will have the photographs of Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep on the piano. They will be my grandparents. I will have all these famous people as my relatives.
Like Eva Luna, Allende also said that she would one day like to try her hand at writing screenplays herself. But, for now, prose fiction--novel length--is enough. And through all the vicissitudes of her romantic and family life, given her new capacity for a relaxed approach toward writing, the crafting of her novels becomes a great solace and tonic for Allende. "Writing is never a burden," she says. "It is pure joy. Life tends to be a burden, because it has very grave moments, with a very heavy karma." But she still jokes that she'll never discuss work in progress--as if such a lack of reticence might also boomerang with karmic vengeance: "It's like boasting about a boyfriend--someone may take him away from you."
Life is loss, Allende admits--but she insists that she will not accept losses without putting up a good fight.
Although the leitmotif of this third period of interviews is less literary than spiritual, less humorous than contemplative, the "lessons" that Allende draws from the loss of Paula also have to do with love. Whereas in earlier interviews Allende had invariably used the word love in connection with sexual passion, she speaks after Paula's death also of maternal and filial love. For example, Allende says that, before Paula's death, she had practiced only conditional love, but that through Paula's departure she learned true "love" as "giving":
I even rarely trust a lover. . . . It is very difficult for me to open up, to fully abandon all in an intimate relationship. I begin from the premise that I will be betrayed. . . .
[Until the last days of Paula's illness], all my relationships, even the relationships with my children, had been a two-way road. . . . But I was left with the everlasting treasure of the love that I gave her and that I know I am capable of giving. (no. 7)
Allende has acquired this knowledge at a very painful price, and for this reason she values even the pain itself: "I do not want to lose this pain," she says. "It makes me a better person" (no. 7).
In speaking of herself as a "better person," Allende is not referring to virtue in the ordinary sense, but rather to a perception that she is humbler, more clear-sighted, more forgiving, more empathic. The loss of Paula also taught Allende to let go of the urge to plan life; her new attitude of fearlessness and openness to the future is a marked change:
I have no plans for the future. . . . If you have no plans for the future, you cannot fear it. You are not afraid of being unable to carry out those plans. I try to live today as best I can. That way I have the feeling that I have finished everything. (no. 7)
And Allende observes in an interview published in December 1994:
My daughter died, and she's with me in a way that she never was when she was alive because she had a life of her own and she had a destiny of her own. She still has them, in the spiritual world she's doing things, but the memory of her lives in me. I carry it with me and it's part of my life in a very vivid way. So vivid, in fact, that when I come here every morning I light a candle for her. I have her photograph and her ashes there and I feel her presence very strongly. There's a lot of sadness still going on, but I know that I will get over that and there will be a point when I will understand the spiritual life better and will not be stuck in the loss. I will probably be connected better to who she is now. (no. 10)
Or, as Olga says in The Infinite Plan: "The dead go hand in hand with the living."
1995-2002: New Lust for Life
Appearing in most of the major European languages in 1995, Paula rose to the no. 1 position on the nonfiction lists of several nations. Reviewers were generally enthusiastic, though a few reviews were mixed. For instance, noting that Suhrkamp classified Paula as a "novel," Der Spiegel dismissed the memoir as kitschy fiction, "an unreflective mishmash of superstition, naiveté, and esotericism, which makes the book a document on the denial of reality."
Allende, however, was immersed precisely in a fight to face reality--and yet not be overcome by it. Indeed, she struggled through the mid-1990s with the overwhelming burden of two family tragedies: not only did she and her husband have to cope with Paula's death, but also with the horrible death of Gordon's teenage daughter (from a drug overdose). Their marriage was on rocky ground for a while; Allende and Gordon entered therapy and slowly worked together to confront their demons. At first, Allende recalls, the two girls' deaths separated her and Gordon; only gradually could they share each other's pain.
I was grieving for my daughter and very closed. His daughter was a drug addict and she died of an overdose. I knew that Willy was suffering very much but he wouldn't share his feelings. So for a while we were both very sad, but we weren't sharing. It didn't bring us closer . . . then we started therapy. We were angry but the therapist pointed out what was right there under the surface, under the anger, which was this incredible, incredible sadness and when we would see the sadness in the other one and admit how sad each of us was, we were able to hold each other and cry.
By the time of the appearance of the Spanish edition of Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses in 1997, Allende no longer felt "stuck in the loss" of Paula's horribly tragic death. Although she had told at least one interviewer in 1995 that she might never write again (see no. 15), the act of composing Aphrodite, as Allende explained during her U.S. book tour in the spring of 1998, helped her rediscover a capacity to live in the present. She had written her memoir of her daughter's death; now she would write a celebration of life: a "memoir of the senses." Aphrodite is, she said in one interview, her "healthy reaction to mourning and writer's block" that followed Paula's death.
Allende's struggle to emerge from her "long tunnel" of grieving forms a prominent theme in Aphrodite:
After the death of my daughter, Paula, I spent three years trying to exorcise my sadness with futile rituals. Those years were three centuries filled with the sensation that the world had lost its color and that a universal grayness had spread inexorably over every surface. I cannot pinpoint the moment when I saw the first brush strokes of color, but when my dreams about food began, I knew that I was reaching the end of a long tunnel of mourning and finally coming out the other end, into the light, with a tremendous desire to eat and cuddle once again.
On Allende's own account, she recovered her artistic powers and her feeling for the sensuality of language by immersing herself joyously in the world of amour and appetite. Revive the senses and the imagination, counsels Allende, and you will revive the spirit too! So Isabel Allende affirmed life by relishing two of its earthiest appetites--sex and food--and in a light, delicate, feminine, playfully poetic way. "When I wrote Paula, about her death, I cried every day," Allende disclosed. "Now, when I was putting together Aphrodite, I finally laughed. A lot. . . ." Mixing the carnal and the culinary, Aphrodite connects Allende's love of writing to the primal drives that create and perpetuate life and make it pleasurable--and thereby reconnects the author to her deepest creative wellsprings as a storyteller.
In literary terms, Aphrodite is virtually unclassifiable. Viewed biographically, however, it is clear that this lavishly illustrated cookbook served as a literary aphrodisiac for Allende's dormant literary powers. And here we can witness the Latin American Scheherazade assuming the persona of the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Indeed, the new work is the author-grandmother's personal recipe for summoning the love goddess within, a self-help book on how to recover a keen taste for life's sweetness--and, yes, its bittersweetness.
As in the case of her earlier books, Allende credits her family--and her familial House of Spirits--with assisting her completion of her new book (most of the recipes were developed by her mother, Panchita Llona). And, she insists, they have also guided her through the "tunnel of mourning" into the "light": "I don't believe in ghosts. But I do believe in memory. When I say somebody's spirit helps me, I mean that when I need poetic inspiration, I think of my grandmother and the crazy character she was. When I need something to be from the heart, I think of Paula, who had such generosity. When I need courage, my grandfather, this stubborn Basque, carries me through. I have photographs of them, all over."
Memory, of course, is the memoirist's prize resource. And it is significant that Allende's two books in the mid-1990s were memoirs, i.e., that Allende wrote another work of nonfiction--rather than fiction--after Paula. While memory had returned, aided by her family spirits, the imaginative powers through which her novels emerged still had not. Indeed, as Allende admitted to one interviewer, throughout the mid-1990s she simply could not write fiction, because "it just wouldn't come": "Fiction, for me, just happens, I let the story unfold itself. I don't think of a plot, an outline, characters. I allow them to appear before me. After Paula died, it just wouldn't come like that. So I did nonfiction: first I wrote about her illness and her death. And now, this" [Aphrodite].
Allende has always maintained that while her nonfiction--like her journalism--is an act of will, her fiction "just comes," arriving unbidden and on its own schedule, a gift from beyond. The gift of fiction had been absent from Allende's life for a long time. Eventually, however, it did "just come." In October 1999, having entered the "light," Allende completed her sixth novel, Daughter of Fortune.
How Allende skillfully drew on her own fortunes--which were inextricably bound up with the tragedy of her daughter's death--constituted one of the chief attractions of the new novel for the informed reader. Indeed, Daughter of Fortune represented an advanced stage in Allende's remarkable program of writing as self-therapy. Allende looked forward to the new millennium and renewed her life by looking backward to the nineteenth century and writing a bildungsroman about a Victorian maiden--and also by looking backward on her own life: the autobiographical resonances of the new novel are manifold. In fact, despite the obvious plot differences between the fortunes of the novel's heroine and Allende's own, it is no exaggeration to call Daughter of Fortune another memoir, this time in the form of a historical romance that broadly reinvents Allende's own youth. Some of the parallels between Allende and Eliza Sommers, the novel's heroine, are quite explicit; in one interview, Allende specifically compares her own upbringing and subservient feminine habits in her first marriage with those of Eliza, who lavishes her Chinese paramour with excessive attention:
My mother and I were the only females, along with the maidservants who were females and who were serving everybody else. That was the model I had--but I was extremely rebellious and I never accepted the situation. . . . I worked, I had several jobs, and I never used [my first husband's] name as a married woman. But I would serve him like a geisha. I would take his clothes every night, and hang them on a chair. If we were at a party, and there was a buffet, for example, I would serve his plate. Now I look back and I can't believe it--I would cut his nails and hair.
Allende also compared her own empty despair and sexual numbness in the wake of Paula's illness with Eliza's identity crisis following her exile from Chile and her miscarriage:
Eliza has to run away from home and all her life changes. She loses her center completely, and I think there's an emotional and physical reaction to that--she closes down. And I felt that way when my daughter fell sick. The very moment that I saw her in intensive care I was menstruating then, and I went into menopause--I thought. It was very sudden and my body closed down and remained closed for three or four years until I forced myself to come back.
Daughter of Fortune may thus be read as the (quite overtly) fictional counterpart to Paula, both of which traverse the same physical space and a comparable social and emotional terrain. And the new work is also a logical successor to her last novel, The Infinite Plan, also set in California; whereas that book imaginatively recast the life history of her second husband, William Gordon, the new novel reimagines Allende's own life. The result is that dark-haired Eliza Sommers is a recognizable fictionalized ancestor of Allende herself. A tempestuous, headstrong, adventuresome, upper-class adopted girl, Eliza too emigrates from Chile to California as she follows the man she loves. In one interview, Allende talked about her own exile experience in ways that illuminate and enrich our understanding both of Eliza's character and of Allende's empathy for the struggles of today's immigrant poor from Latin America:
They come because they're desperate, so I feel their situation mirrors a little bit what I experienced when I went to Venezuela. Of course, I wasn't as poor as these people are, and I was more educated, but . . . I was running away from something. So I can relate to their situation.
[But I relocated to the U.S.] because I fell in love. . . . I did not come in despair. I came because I wanted to be with a man. But I still had to adapt. I had to learn a new language, learn another way of life, and I also had very difficult step-children who were into drugs--a very messed-up family. . . . His daughter was a drug addict, and she died of an overdose.
In another interview, she added: "I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of the losers, not the white male victors who came here late and took over, but from the perspective of the women, the people of color who were wiped out."
Daughter of Fortune is, in one sense, a study in border culture, challenging readers to ponder the complexities of temporal as well as geographical borders: how the life of a young Latina possesses countless parallels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The novel's opening scenes are set in the Chilean port of Valparaiso in the 1840s. Eliza is a foundling, taken in by an English clergyman and his spinster sister. She is brought up to be a proper and virtuous English lady, complete with corsets and strict piano practice (with a rod down her back to keep it straight). Eliza's independent spirit chafes at the formalities and rigidities of British club life in Valparaiso, and she escapes whenever possible to enjoy the warm, easygoing company of the superstitious Indian cook, who tells Eliza stories of the legends and traditions of Chilean culture. At sixteen, Eliza falls in love with Joaquin Andieta, a passionate intellectual from the Chilean working class. When California "gold fever" spreads to Chile, Eliza's lover emigrates, hoping to send back enough money to take care of his poverty-stricken mother--and leaving the pregnant girl behind. She goes in search of Joaquin, concealing herself in the hold of a ship, falls ill, loses her baby, and is saved by a Chinese healer, Tao Chi'en. In California, against the colorful backdrop of the bandits and madams and call girls of the Wild West, a second love story eventually develops between Eliza and Tao Chi'en.
Rushing headlong from one dramatic scene to the next, heedless of improbabilities, Daughter of Fortune is a high-spirited romp belonging to the picaresque tradition beloved of Spanish writers from Cervantes to Galdos. Unashamedly, indeed insouciantly and effusively, Allende trots out all the stereotypical conventions of popular romances and Elizabethan dramas: the foundling Eliza discovers she is really the illegitimate daughter of the clergyman's sea-captain brother; the clergyman's sister hides her scandalous past of an affair with a married man; cross-dressing Eliza conceals her female identity as she conducts her manhunt for Joaquin, even touring with an acting company and playing a female stage role; she is befriended by the big-hearted peasant woman and the tarts with hearts of gold; and it all leads to a Dickensian happy-ending marriage to the good doctor who saved her life and has patiently awaited her. Characters' names are also transparently symbolic: the heroine evokes both Bernard Shaw's rags-to-riches Eliza Doolittle and Dickens's prim Esther Summerson; the Chinese healer's name implies his balanced energy of dynamic serenity, making him a perfect foil to the impetuous revolutionary Joaquin.
Allende also packs her exuberant epic with the social history of the tumultuous decade spanning 1843 to 1853: British expatriate life "in the colonies," Mapuche Indian tribal customs in midcentury Chile, American immigrant experience and the California gold rush of 1849, Tao Chi'en's youth in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, and much more. Sometimes its historical allusions are quite specific: for instance, Joaquin Andieta is obviously the Chilean freedom fighter Joaquin Murieta, who roamed the California valleys and staged Robin Hood-style robberies.
Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic greeted Daughter of Fortune as evidence that Allende's fictional powers had fully returned. "One of the great writers of our time," Hispanic hailed Allende. "A rich adventure story set against the emergence of the American nation," trumpeted Britain's New Statesman. "It may well be her best novel yet."
By January 2000, Daughter of Fortune had climbed the best-seller lists of most European as well as North American and Latin American nations. But the "gold rush fever" for the novel, incited by media celebrity, was still to come.
On February 17, Oprah Winfrey, the most popular talk-show host in the United States, chose Daughter of Fortune as the March selection for Oprah's Book Club. Oprah's vast TV audience soon began snapping up Allende's new novel, which rose that week to the no. 1 position on the New York Times best-seller list (and shot to the top of the Internet's Amazon.com bookseller list within eight hours). More than a million copies sold during February and March 2000; the novel went on to sell 1.5 million copies in the American edition alone.
On March 28, Allende appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and discussed Daughter of Fortune. At Oprah's traditional televised dinner with fans of her club's author of the month--the four guest fans of Allende included a North Carolina graduate student, a Panamanian housewife, an a cappella singer, and a young businesswoman/mother of three--Allende shared what she had "learned in the course of losing Paula" and the rituals whereby she "remembers her daughter's spirit every day." A few weeks later, asked to comment on the record-breaking sales of her new novel, she replied in two words: "Thank Oprah."
In truth, however, as Allende well knew, she had her faith in herself--and in her family and in destiny--to thank first and foremost for her phenomenal literary and publishing triumph. Just as Eliza Sommers reinvented herself numerous times and established a new life in the San Francisco Bay area, so too had Isabel Allende. Like Eliza, Allende had become the daughter of fortune, blessed with the courage to grow through her crises. Both author and heroine had come to possess the strength of what Allende describes--referring both to the mystery of sex and to Eliza's wonder at the adventure of life--as "an honest desire to decipher enigmas."
What Allende had once said of Eva Luna could well sum up this newest phase of her life quest: in a strange way, Isabel Allende is her newest heroine. Eliza Sommers, soy yo. In the aftermath of Paula's death, Allende's journey, like Eliza's own to California, has lost its goal-directed focus, yet not its spirit and impetus. One recalls the words of Tao Chi'en to Eliza: "You don't go anywhere in life, Eliza, you just keep walking."
Or perhaps galloping. Indeed, almost without pausing for breath, Allende maintained her fast-paced schedule and immediately began writing a new novel, whose origin is partly in Allende's experience with Oprah's Book Club. Many readers, including Oprah herself, had told Allende that they wanted more closure to Daughter of Fortune. That desire gave impetus to thoughts already taking shape in Allende's imagination.
Such was the context in which Portrait in Sepia was conceived. Indeed, on January 8, 2000--even before the phone call from Oprah--she began writing what would become Portrait in Sepia. It was completed in less than a year and appeared in Spanish in May 2001 under the title Retrato en Sepia and then in November in English from HarperCollins. This sequel to Daughter of Fortune is also a prequel to her first novel. Portrait in Sepia is the middle saga in a trilogy spanning several generations and three continents. The people portrayed in the novel are the grandparents of those in The House of the Spirits and the grandchildren of those in her previous book, Daughter of Fortune.
Portrait in Sepia thus completes the story that began with The House of the Spirits. It picks up with Eliza Sommers's and Tao Chi'en's love affair, tracing the lives of their children, Lucky and Lynn Sommers, and Lynn's daughter, Aurora del Valle. But Portrait in Sepia is chiefly the tale of Aurora, also known by her Chinese name of Mai Ling, a photographer who travels the coast from her native San Francisco to the Straits of Magellan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A successor to the clairvoyant Clara of The House of the Spirits and Eliza in Daughter of Fortune, Aurora is named after a new dawn in a New World. Like Eliza, Aurora too is a daughter of fortune, raised amid Santiago's wealthy class. Set largely in San Francisco and Chile between 1862 and 1910, the novel spans the first thirty years of the life of Aurora, a woman of mixed race--part Chilean, part Chinese, part English--who tries to unravel her past. Born in San Francisco in 1880, Aurora tells her story three decades later from Chile, where she was taken as a small girl.
The novel opens with the death of Aurora's mother during her birth. Aurora is raised by her maternal grandmother, Eliza Sommers, until she is five, then by her paternal grandmother, Paulina del Valle, who conspires to conceal from the child the unusual circumstances of her birth. (Paulina withholds important details of Aurora's family from her, such as the true identity of her father.) At the age of five, Aurora suffers a trauma when her grandfather, Tao Chi'en, is assassinated by a Chinese secret society. She is delivered over to the Chilean aristocracy and undertakes a journey of self-discovery to southern Chile, where she is unhappily married. Aurora experiences various wars--the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), when Chile invaded Peru and Bolivia and wrested important territory from them, and the civil war that followed. Seeking the source of her anxiety against a backdrop of the civil war, Aurora retraces her origins to San Francisco's Chinatown. (The scenes of life under the dictatorial president Balcameda seek to remind readers, as the dust jacket points out, of General Pinochet's authoritarian regime.)
Aurora is given a camera at age thirteen and immediately becomes a dedicated photographer, a feminist committed to her professional passion, and a model career woman who lets nothing stop her. Aurora, the narrator, seeks to understand the trauma of her first five years by using her camera to decipher her nightmares. "Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story; I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses that luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone for telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia."
The camera is the key tool in Aurora's reconstruction of her life. It is her mechanism for discovery, exemplifying the power of images to capture the truth of a moment. In photography, Aurora discovers, "Everything is related. What at first view seems to be a tangle of coincidences is in the precise eye of the camera revealed in all its perfect symmetry." She reflects: "Through photography and the written word, I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past." We see here that Aurora is a vocational and spiritual ancestor to Eva Luna, working with still images rather than the motion pictures of television.
Indeed, it is only by reviewing the images she has captured that Aurora can comprehend her own history. In the process of developing these images, the true identity of the subjects is revealed, from their secret origins to their marital infidelities. Aurora thus becomes a photographer dedicated to capturing "the multi-faceted and tormented face of Chile, a country with a bad memory." Her ethos is summed up in the attitude of her teacher, Don Juan Ribero: "He believes in photography as a personal testimony, a way of seeing the world, and that way must be honest, using technology as a medium for capturing reality, not distorting it."
Published first in Spanish in May 2001, Retrato en Sepia occupied the no. 1 slot on the best-seller lists in Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile for months, ahead of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and Sydney Sheldon's and Tom Clancy's new novels. El País greeted it warmly, and it also topped the lists in Spain, Colombia, and Mexico.
When Portrait in Sepia appeared in English in October 2001, it received warm reviews. The New York Times wrote: "Isabel Allende makes it look easy . . . it is a book about transformation--of people and nations and of the rights of women." In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called Portrait in Sepia "the best book Allende has published in the United States since her splendid first novel of nearly two decades ago." The Times (London) concluded: "You could say that the author is pioneering a new genre, not magical realism and certainly not naturalism, but a kind of hyper fiction: a highly colored turbo-charged version of possible truths." The Weekend Australian raved, "Isabel Allende is an absolute dyed-in-the-wool hussy of a storyteller. She is the undisputed queen of Latin American writers, a peppery tease . . . she flaunts love and delight, grief and loss, death and violence with the ease of a seasoned, yarning jezebel."
But there were some loud demurrals from this chorus. The Rocky Mountain News asked, "Can there be a feminist bodice ripper?" It answered, "Probably not," and gave Allende's novel a grade of C+. The Independent (London) moaned: "The story never really lifts off the page . . . the living image in Portrait in Sepia fails to emerge from the shadows." Nonetheless, the New York Daily News pronounced Allende "the romance queen of the literary novel. The book is languorous, sweet-toothed, voluptuous, and a little trashy."
And so Isabel Allende keeps on galloping ahead. Not only is Portrait in Sepia her second novel in two years; in addition, Allende's first novel for young adults, Ciudad de las bestias (City of the Beasts) was published in Spain in 2002. She is presently at work on its sequel, The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, and also on a short nonfiction book on Chile for National Geographic, tentatively entitled My Invented Country.
Not everyone is happy with her productivity. The Rocky Mountain News concluded: "She seems to be cranking them out at a pace similar to that enjoyed by many romance novelists. One wishes she would take a breath."
But Allende isn't fazed by such comments.
"This is a very productive time for me and I have to use it," she maintains. "When the stories come, you've got to get them out."
So what might be the next milestone in Isabel Allende's own passionate pilgrimage?
"I want to make a few changes," she told one interviewer. "I want more privacy. More silence. I have been doing too much out in the world."
Already she has taken steps to enrich her personal life. According to Gordon, "When we lived in our other house, we didn't entertain very much. Isabel sort of stuck to her room. Now she's opened up. She really entertains her friends and it's wonderful to see. She's begun to enjoy life a little bit which is not easy for her."
Her day is well ordered and includes a rich family life. Her son Nicolás and his children live just five minutes away from her. She conducts interviews and other business out of her Sausalito office, which once housed the town's first brothel, then was a cookie factory and next a church before becoming her home base. "It's going down in the social scale," she jokes.
She turned sixty in August 2002. Looking ahead to her birthday, she mused, "It's a time for reflection. You have a chunk of life behind you. All the interesting things already happened. From now on, I can sit on my laurels and crush them. If I die tomorrow, it's fine because I've done everything I came to do."
But for the immediate future, Allende vows that she will keep writing--indeed, as of this writing, she is reportedly already at work on another novel. Next year, with her traditional private ceremony of candles and meditation in her shingled, flower-filled cottage on the San Francisco waterfront, Isabel Allende will resume work on it--as always, on January 8.
