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Back to results Add to Marked List Save to My Archive | Table of Contents | Print View | Durable URL for this text | Download citation | Email Full Text ISABEL ALLENDE 1942- (CHILEAN) from Encyclopedia of the Novel. Schellinger, Paul (ed.); Hudson, Christopher; Rijsberman, Marijke (asst eds). Chicago; London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. 2 vols. Copyright 1998 Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. View Full Record

ISABEL ALLENDE 1942- (CHILEAN)

Isabel Allende is perhaps the most widely read Hispanic author in the world. Although known principally for her novels and short stories, Allende has also written plays, essays, and film scripts. Her first novel, La casa de los espritus (1982; The House of the Spirits ), brought her immediate recognition. Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat and niece of Salvador Allende, Chile's first Socialist president. She did not begin writing novels until after the 1973 military coup that led to Salvador Allende's death. Her novels reflect the social and political upheaval of her Chilean homeland wrought by dictator Augusto Pinochet's regime, which lasted until 1990. Allende initially gained fame in 1968 in Santiago as a journalist, and she wrote a regular column for the magazine Paula. She also was a popular talk show host on Chile's first television network. Following the coup, Allende moved with her family to Venezuela, where the seeds of The House of the Spirits began to germinate. Allende's emergence as a novelist came at a time when the Latin American literary movement known as the Boom had already been passed to the next generation. The Boom of literary innovation (1940-70) began a new era of modern Hispanic letters that brought international acclaim for Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez. Post-Boom writers were defined by their desire to attack oppressive social and political structures with a mix of myth and history. The success of The House of the Spirits immediately marked Allende as a member of this new generation, which included Argentina's Luisa Valenzuela and Mempo Giardinelli and Chile's Antonio Skrmeta. Allende herself shuns literary trends and resists classification. Allende's signature work, The House of the Spirits began as a letter to her dying grandfather on his 100th birthday. Born of nostalgia, rage, and desperation at having reached the age of 40 without, as the author states, "a major accomplishment in my life," the novel bears witness to a family's 50-year saga, moving through recent Chilean history as it chronicles the political maelstroms that culminate in Chile's bloody 1973 coup. The House of the Spirits recounts the story of the Trueba family, whose patriarch, Esteban Trueba, ruthless and respectable, personifies the ruling class in a society of steep hierarchies. Trueba is the archetypal Latin American landowner, and Allende sets him alongside a new breed of Latin American female embodied in young Alba, a political activist. The women of The House of the Spirits , whose names denote light---Clara, Blanca, Alba, and Nivea--- combat a dark legacy of oppression with passion and compassion. Allende's characters are fashioned out of the real, the eccentric, and the mythical, as well as a touch of magical realism (Clara is chided for her telekinetic tendencies; Frula returns from the dead to say good-bye to Clara). Magical realism, a literary style developed by the authors of the Latin American Boom, combines objective reality with fantasy. Allende's

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developed by the authors of the Latin American Boom, combines objective reality with fantasy. Allende's first novel has brought comparisons to Gabriel Garca Mrquez's landmark Boom novel Cien aos de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude). Indeed, both novels are family sagas with recognizable historical settings in unnamed Latin American countries, and both are brilliant examples of magical realism at its best. Allende's subsequent novel, De amor y de sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows ), like The House of the Spirits , relies on real life events, and in this case the discovery of the remains of 15 corpses secretly buried in the Lonquen region near Santiago, Chile. The novel's protagonist, Irene Beltrn, a journalist, sets out to cover a story behind the bodies, and in the process exposes a clandestine war of brutality and torture during Pinochet's military rule in Chile. Eva Luna (1987; Eva Luna) departs from Allende's historical focus and enters into fantasy and adventure in the city and jungle. The author suppresses real life names and places but hints that the novel's events take place in Venezuela, where she lived in exile. Eva Luna is an orphan, offspring of the brief union of a servant woman and a dying Indian man. Subsisting as a servant at the beginning and holding a number of odd jobs as she moves from place to place, Eva eventually involves herself in guerrilla warfare in the jungle. She survives this lifestyle as a modern Scheherezade, telling stories that not only save her life but carry her from obscurity to fame when she becomes a successful soap opera writer. Allende, who identifies with Eva Luna more than any of her other characters, plays with this theme of soap operas and storytelling, inviting the reader to interpret the text on three distinct levels with several possible endings: Eva is telling her true story; she made up a story about her life; or she is writing a soap opera. Eva Luna the soap opera writer or protagonist is a picaresque heroine in what could be called a feminist novel.Los cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; The Stories of Eva Luna) is a collection of 23 short stories unified by the theme of love. Allende employs the Balzacian device of recurring characters in this work, which is set, like Eva Luna, in the tropical region of Agua Santa. Allende's stories address the talismanic power of language, and her compelling characters are intensified with strong strokes of color and humor. Unlike Allende's other works, El plan infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan) is an American story set in California and Vietnam during the 1950s and 1960s. It fictionalizes the life and times of Gregory Reeves, a white American raised in a Los Angeles barrio, who becomes a successful lawyer. (The real-life model for Reeves is Allende's husband, William Gordan.) The novel addresses American attitudes toward religion and focuses on the racial-social tensions of the times. Paula (1994; Paula), Allende's most widely read work after The House of the Spirits , begins as an intimate letter to her daughter Paula, who lay in a coma in a Madrid hospital. Allende's letter begins "Listen, Paula, ..." and with her mother's voice, Allende speaks to her sleeping Paula, distracting anguish in a family memoir that unfolds into a dialogue of love between mother and daughter. This book is the biography of Paula, the autobiography of Isabel Allende, and the history of her family. It is the present tense account of a mother losing the fight for her child's life. Structurally more complex than Allende's previous works, as it intertwines past and present, blending the two at its conclusion, Paula has been called a "fictionalized memoir" : it is the true life recollection lit, at times, by the creations of memory and imagination. Allende credits no formal plan for the development of the narrative, only "inspirational forces of the beloved family spirits standing behind me." Afrodita (Allende's latest work, 1997), is a collection of essays on aphrodisiacs, erotic recipes, and adventure full of illuminating illustrations. Allende's writings have been translated into more than 30 languages and made into films. She continues to draw both scholarly attention as well as international public affection. Celia Correas Zapata See also 1982) THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS BY ISABEL ALLENDE (LA CASA DE LOS ESPRITUS

Literature Online - Criticism & Reference: Full Text

Biography
Born in Lima, Peru, 2 August 1942; niece of former Chilean President Salvador Allende who died in the course of the military takeover of September 1973. Attended a private high school in Santiago de Chile, graduated 1959. Secretary, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, Santiago, 1959-65. Worked as a journalist, editor, and advice columnist for Paula magazine, Santiago, 1967-74; interviewer for Canal 13/Canal 7 television station, 1970-75; worked on movie newsreels, 1973-75; administrator, Colegio Marroco, Caracas, 1979-82; guest teacher, Montclair State College, New Jersey, 1985, and
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Literature Online - Criticism & Reference: Full Text Colegio Marroco, Caracas, 1979-82; guest teacher, Montclair State College, New Jersey, 1985, and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1988; taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, 1989.

Nov e ls by Alle nde

La casa de los espritus , 1982; as The House of the Spirits , translated by Magda Bogin, 1985 De amor y de sombra, 1984; as Of Love and Shadows , translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, 1987 Eva Luna, 1987; as Eva Luna, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, 1988 Los cuentos de Eva Luna, 1990; as The Stories of Eva Luna, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, 1991 El plan infinito, 1991; as The Infinite Plan, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, 1993

Othe r Writings:
short stories, journalism, essays, plays, film scripts, and an informal family history (Paula, 1994).

Furthe r Re ading

Crystall, Elyse, Jill Kunheim, and Mary Lahoun, "An Interview with Isabel Allende," Contemporary Literature 33:4 (Winter 1992) Foreman, Gabrielle P., "Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call," Feminist Studies 18:2 (Summer 1992) Gould Levine, Linda, "Isabel Allende," in Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book , edited by Diane E. Marting, New York: Greenwood Press, 1990 Hart, Patricia, Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende, Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1989 Meyer, Doris, "Exile and the Female Condition in Isabel Allende's De amor y de sombra," International Fiction Review 15:2 (1988) Zapata, Celia Correas, Isabel Allende: Vida y espritus: Una biografa literaria, Madrid: Plaza & Janes, 1998

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