She fled Pinochet’s junta and began to write as a way of coping with exile and loss. She became a best-selling novelist but her masterpiece was a memoir of her daughter, who died at 26. Maya Jaggi on a feminist pioneer of Latin American literature
Isabel Allende divides her life starkly into two: before and after the 1973 coup in Chile that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power and precipitated an exile from which she has never fully returned.
“I never imagined such a thing was possible in Chile, which had such a solid, 160-year-old democracy – it was called the ‘England’ of Latin America,” she says. “It was a revelation that there were concentration camps and torture centres all over the country. It had been there in the shadows, the brutality and violence, but for me, it was like waking into a nightmare.”
The military coup toppled her “uncle” – strictly, her second cousin – and godfather Salvador Allende, the world’s first freely elected Marxist president, who committed suicide – or was murdered – in the burning presidential palace in Santiago. (That his daughter, now a socialist politician, is also called Isabel still results in a confusion that the author, who sometimes fancies she was switched with another infant at birth, might relish.)
Yet while her family was scattered by the coup, she is convinced that had she not fled across the mountains, eventually making her way to Venezuela, where she stayed until 1987, she would not have become a writer. That vocation not only helped her break the junta’s “chain of hatred” in her own soul, but later eased her recovery from the death, seven years ago, of her daughter Paula.
Now 57, she wrote her first novel when she was almost 40, in Venezuela. The House of the Spirits (1982), tracing four generations of Chilean women up to the aftermath of the coup, became an international bestseller. With its English translation in 1985, she became the first of many women writing in Latin America to join the fraternity enjoying worldwide acclaim since the so-called Latin literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s – notably Nobel laureate Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Her books have sold millions in 27 languages across the world. They have inspired plays and films, including, in 1993, Bille August’s The House of the Spirits, starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, and in 1994 Betty Kaplan’s Of Love and Shadows, starring Antonio Banderas. There was even a musical in Iceland based on The House of the Spirits.
Her appeal to her compatriots lies partly in the Allende name and her vocal opposition to the junta. But the allure of her writing is far wider. Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish at Amherst College in Massachusetts, says: “She came late to the banquet but achieved an international reputation that exceeded many men. She brings feelings to the fore in a way male writers don’t, with a panoramic view of politics and history that illuminates the connection with individual lives.”
Yet her critical reception has been mixed. While Fay Weldon called The House of the Spirits the “perfect novel – now that’s written the rest of us can all go home”, others lament that the early “spell” has been broken, complaining of shallow romance and potboilers, of sentiment that tips into sentimentality. Some bemoan a North American influence on her fiction since she moved to the United States in 1987.
“There’s an ambivalence towards her even among Latin American critics,” Stavans says. “She revived a tradition of melodrama and the light women’s novel – la novela rosa, as serialised in newspapers across the Spanish-speaking world – and turned it around in a more sophisticated way to bring to mind ‘magical realism’. She’s called derivative by those who saw The House of the Spirits as a revamp of [Mrquez’s] One Hundred Years of Solitude from the point of view of women. But what infuriates them is the bridge she forms between popular culture and the highbrow, and that she’s so successful.”
Alberto Manguel, who edited Other Fires, an anthology of work by Latin American women writers, says: “She is fascinated by melodrama, the romanticised, the sentimental. But she’s much more interesting stylistically, and is able to tell these stories without forgetting political angles. She asserts the right of her women characters to live their own lives and speak in their own language – which can verge on purple prose, though there’s no such thing in Spanish.” Of her popularity in the English-speaking world, he adds: “Her fiction does correspond to the stereotypical vision of what Latin America might be: the passionate, dark- eyed heroine; the cool, male, governor – you are in the world of El Zorro. But that overlap is not a fault in the writing.”
Poised and very funny, though more serious in private, Allende appears to mirror her books’ vivacious if volatile mix of hard realism and playfully edged romanticism. She was shortlisted for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award for Daughter of Fortune, her first novel in eight years, and read out the “offending” passages at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London during a recent visit with amusement and aplomb, her tone underlining their deflating irony.
While Allende declares dramatically that all the women in her family run headlong after men – as she did in emigrating from Venezuela to California (“The second move was by choice; I fell in lust with a guy”) – she has been adamant about earning her own living since she was 17.
Daughter of Fortune began, she says, as a book about passion and ended up being about freedom. Set amid the Californian gold rush of the mid-19th century, its main characters are Chileans and Chinese who followed the trail for reasons of their own. Yet the lover whom the heroine Eliza follows from Chile fades from the plot, leaving only traces of a mythic Latino bandit. Eliza, disguised as a boy, grows too fond of her new-found liberty to relinquish it even for the most seductive man. “When Eliza is sleeping outdoors, surrounded by snakes, bears, Indians, bandits, for the first time in her life she’s not afraid, not restrained in a corset,” says Allende. “It’s an epiphany I had: the self-sufficiency she has now she can’t give up. I belonged to the first generation of organised feminists in Chile, though by no means the first – my grandmother struggled for the vote. Going out into a man’s world, like Eliza, to do things their mothers would never have dreamt of doing, to conquer that space, is what my generation of women did.”
Allende was born during World War IIin Lima, Peru. Her father Toms Allende (Salvador’s cousin) was a Chilean diplomat who absconded in an “unsolved mystery” from his job and his family when Isabel was three. She now thinks he may have been bisexual and embroiled in a scandal. She never saw him again (her mother cut his face out of all family photographs) until called upon to identify his body after he suffered a heart attack in the street. She was unable to recall what he had looked like.
Allende sees herself as marked by his disappearance. “Until very recently, I didn’t trust men,” she says. “I thought they weren’t reliable; if you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself – including raising the kids. I never allowed anyone else to pay the bills because I understood that economic independence created the rest. I never surrendered to a relationship with a man the way I did to my children and my mother.”
She returned to Chile with her mother to live with her maternal grandparents and two uncles in Santiago. While the conservative Catholic household left the poor-relation Isabel prone to rebellion and mixing with the Amerindian servants, its anglophilia later found ironic expression in the English expatriates of Daughter of Fortune. “My grandfather was Basque and my grandmother Castilian, but everything from England was good – including the soap. I was born in the middle of World War II, and practically everyone in the country had pro-German sympathies; the Chilean armed forces were trained by the Prussians. But my grandparents were knitting socks for the British troops.”
After she was 10 her mother remarried another diplomat. Allende lived in Bolivia and Lebanon, attending a Beirut school run by British Quakers, before being sent home at 15 (her grandfather enrolled her in an English finishing school), and starting work two years later. She had a spell translating Barbara Cartland into Spanish (“I couldn’t resist making improvements”), then became a successful journalist, working for a magazine, Paula, that campaigned for divorce and abortion in the staunchly Catholic country, and penning “humorous” feminist columns, including one called Civilise Your Caveman. In the 1960s – sporting long, dyed-blonde hair and driving a car painted with giant flowers – she had her own TV chat show. “I was a lousy journalist,” she insists. “I had no problem exaggerating or making up quotes. My colleagues thought they were being objective, but I never thought they were and I didn’t even pretend.”
At 19, Allende married an Anglo-Chilean engineering student with whom she lived for 25 years and had two children. She says she served him “like a geisha. It was the way a Latin American woman served a man, but I exaggerated, because all my life is about exaggeration. I had three jobs. We had a car; he’d take it, and I’d go on the bus with the groceries, then come running home to serve him a drink. I thought I was a feminist, but I was raising the children alone; my husband never changed a diaper. I never applied the theory to my practical life.”
Though not “political” like her Allende cousins, she chaffed against not only male prerogatives (“I’d wanted to be a man since I was five”) but an impervious hierarchy that was partly racial: the more Indian the blood, the lower the class. “I’m fascinated with how you can break a system, defy and challenge it. As a woman, that’s determined my life. I was brought up seeing the injustice of a class system; the poor didn’t have a chance. The people who had control for generations had impunity. It was very hard to change society when I was growing up, though it happened with Salvador Allende.”
While she regrets not having done more for her uncle’s short-lived regime, the military coup when she was 31 awoke her to “the amount of evil that was possible. I was a very frivolous person. In my humorous columns or TV programme I was always looking for the ironic and funny; I failed to see the tragedy brewing in my country.”
But in the first 48 hours after the coup, her “perpetual innocence, extended adolescence” were shattered. “My husband … had to take food to workers stranded by the curfew. Driving through the streets, I could see corpses, and books being burned, and people dragged into trucks running with blood.”
Partly because she was an Allende and a familiar face on television, she found herself called on to help the resistance. “Through friends in the church, I smuggled information and hid people in my house before they could be taken to the border or, when that became unsafe, to asylum in embassies.”
The experience is most closely reflected in her second novel, Of Love and Shadows, in which a fashion journalist is drawn into the resistance after falling for a photographer. Though Allende had initially refused safe passage offered by the Mexican embassy, after 14 months of the terror she fled. “By then I’d been fired from my job, and I was on a list. I couldn’t take the fear for my family any more.” Her husband joined her in Caracas when it became clear she could not return.
Despite hardship, Venezuela was liberating. “I’d come from a country where we dress in grey and pretend we’re British, to a place enjoying the oil boom, where there was an erotic charge in the streets.”
The House of the Spirits was begun on January 8 (Allende has since started all her books on the same date) as a letter to her dying grandfather, the model for its landowner and conservative senator Esteban Trueba. His wife Clara was modelled on Allende’s grandmother, a disciple of Madame Blavatsky who experimented with telepathy (“she didn’t trust the mail”). While her daughter Blanca has a taboo romance with a young worker on El Patrn’s estate, her granddaughter Alba smuggles dissidents to sanctuary.
“I’ve worked with and for women all my life and have known very few weak women,” says Allende. “In Latin American literature of the 1960s and 1970s boom, female protagonists were stereotypes, clichs – the prostitute, bride, mother – because that generation of men were brought up segregated from women.”
First published in Spain, the novel has elements of a style more associated with the Caribbean tropics – Alejo Carpentier’s Cuba or Garca Mrquez’s Colombian coast – than the Andes. Yet Allende has long ceased to be flattered by comparisons with the Nobel laureate – made, she says, only by anglophone critics. “This always happens to women when they do anything creative; they need a male model to validate them. If I were a man, no one would be comparing me to anybody.”
For her, magical realism has been present across the world, from African and Arab tales to Scandinavian sagas and Gothic novels. “In the literary world of white males, the restrictive, rational literature written lately in industrialised nations, reality needs to be explained, controlled. With women of the same period there’s a sense of magic, because we can’t control things. As a writer I accept everything is possible; layers of truth and belief and the subjective – dreams, coincidences, fears, obsessions. All that gives texture to writing.”
Manguel rejects the view of Allende as derivative. “The whole of literature written in Spanish either has an element of fantasy or is documentary, and these borders were crossed. Allende reflects the reality she knows, with an element that is not logical or rational, in a playful way.”
In The House of the Spirits, myth and fact are fused (Salvador Allende appears as The Candidate and Pablo Neruda as The Poet), Allende blurring memory and imagination to overcome homesickness. “I do invent memories. My grandmother died when I was so young, but people have told me I had a need to have a grandmother, so I used imagination and wishful thinking.” The fantasy is seldom literal. (Of the film, shot in Denmark, Allende says: “I missed the book’s sense of humour, the irony – the movie had a Scandinavian gloom.”)
She abandoned fantasy in Of Love and Shadows, which chronicled the real discovery of bodies of some of the “disappeared” in a disused mineshaft in 1978, and was written “out of anger”. Yet in Eva Luna, about an Amerindian Sheherazade-turned-scriptwriter, and “a celebration of being a woman and a storyteller”, she restored it with elements of kitsch borrowed from Latin soap opera, the telenovela.
Antonio Skrmeta, the Chilean author on whose novel the film Il Postino was based, is writing a screenplay of Eva Luna for the same director, Michael Radford. “Isabel makes fun of the telenovela, like all intellectuals do,” Skrmeta says. “But she has a tenderness towards the genre because people love and follow it.”
Allende’s marriage faltered as she was succeeding as a writer. She went off on an affair with a musician in Madrid, but after three months she returned to Caracas. She divorced in 1987. “Maybe I grew in a different direction. I wanted passion in my life. It wasn’t infidelity or fights. We never slammed a door.”
Within months, she had met her second husband while on a book tour in California. William Gordon, an Irish-American lawyer contesting insurance companies for the “small man”, grew up in the Los Angeles barrio. (“He thinks he speaks Spanish,” Allende sniffs.) He became the model for Gregory Reeves in her California-set novel The Infinite Plan, about a post-Vietnam generation “defeated by the American dream”.
While Allende was promoting the book in Spain her daughter Paula fell ill with porphyria, a hormonal disorder that is rarely fatal, but which left her in a coma. After six months in intensive care, “she started breathing on her own, so we took her home to California and then Western medicine gave up on her. For the six months till she died we tried everything: acupuncture, herbs, psychics, magnets, Shamanism, anything that might make her comfortable and that was not invasive. She’d already had enough pain.”
Alternative medicine is explored in Daughter of Fortune, through the character of the Chinese physician Tao Chi’en, with whom Eliza slowly falls in love. But the book was halted by Paula’s illness and death in December 1992. “I thought I was never going to write again,” Allende says. “I had to pull myself out of a writer’s block and very dark depression. I just went to hell; it’s a moment of grief you can’t avoid and can’t make better. I tried Prozac; it didn’t work – I’d rather be in pain. Nothing helps except time, but you start drawing from an inside strength, a resilience you didn’t know you had.”
While her daughter was ill, Allende wrote an extended letter to her, in the diminishing hope that she would one day read it. The letter grew into her memoir Paula, which she calls “the most important book I will ever write, which has the greatest truth. Writing is exorcism. It deals with the demons of the past, sorts out the confusion. Life happens so fast there’s no time to see the connections or consequences; there’s too much noise everywhere. But in my work, there is no noise. Everything has a ripple effect in a book; in the years of introspection, I grow. For me, it’s like meditation or prayer.”
While her mother was aghast at the disclosure of “family secrets”, Allende even added snatches of love letters between Paula and her husband of only a year, Ernesto. He consented to Isabel’s taking Paula home to California because she was better able to care for her, with nurses. “Ernesto called me on the phone, crying, saying, ‘Paula was different, you only knew her as a mother.’ He sent me love letters they’d exchanged, revealing aspects of my daughter I didn’t suspect. To me she was mainly intellectual, a brain. But she was emotionally immature, very dependent and – I was embarrassed – very passionate sexually.”
Austere yet full of lyrical flights of memory, interspersed with bulletins from her daughter’s bedside, Paula has been seen as Allende’s masterpiece and brought her a new readership. For her, “it saved my life”. Yet she was unable to return to fiction, convinced “that the world had lost its colour and that a universal greyness had spread inexorably over every surface”.
She also had an experience mirrored in Eliza’s asexual disguise. “I turned 50 when Paula fell sick. Grief and menopause shut me down sexually and emotionally. I look at pictures and see I aged 10 years. I couldn’t laugh. To me, sensuality is related to humour, and if I can’t laugh, I can’t make love. It was so hard to think of myself making love when Paula couldn’t.”
It took three years for her to emerge from mourning. Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses signalled a reviving interest in the sensual (she had erotic dreams about a “salsa-smeared Antonio Banderas rolling naked on a tortilla”). A playful meditation on aphrodisiacs – the “bridge between gluttony and lust, interspersed with recipes” – it helped her return to life and to fiction, though she reflects: “I’ve changed because I have a sort of detachment now; I know how little I can control in my life or of others’ safety and happiness, though to learn to love without trying to control the environment is hard.”
Settled in San Rafael, in northern California’s affluent Marin county, Allende has attacked an “apartheid” where Latinos exist “to care for children and wash cars, but people want them to disappear like ghosts at night”. In Daughter of Fortune she explores people’s impulse to reinvent themselves in a new land while tracing incipient hostilities between Yanquis and Latinos after the war between 1846 and 1848 that forced Mexico to cede to the US territory where gold had been found. “I’m an immigrant myself. I live in an area with a large immigrant population – though I’m privileged: I’m legal and speak some English; I’m married to an American and can support myself.”
While some see her as having opened doors in the US for other Latina writers – Laura Esquival, Cristina Garca, Sandra Cisneros – Allende senses changes in her own fiction. “I speak less Spanish and my writing is becoming less baroque; I use fewer adjectives.”
Allende has now found a “sisterhood” in other US writers, such as Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker and Louise Erdrich. At last, she says she feels settled. “It was hard the first time [in Venezuela] because we didn’t have the right state of mind. We were always looking south and never quite unpacked; I never expected the dictatorship to last 17 years.”
Since the amnesty of 1988, Allende has visited Chile often, where she is top of the bestseller lists, and says that even if Pinochet is freed by Britain after 15 months’ house arrest, and never faces trial, “justice has been done; he’s a pariah and an embarrassment, even to the right” – though she adds with a shrewd stab of irony: “I only hope he doesn’t make a miraculous recovery and go back to sitting in the Senate.”
She insists she no longer hates Pinochet. “I realised 20 years ago that hatred is a very heavy burden. I’d still fight for what’s truthful, but this is not about him but about grief that needs to be acknowledged for true reconciliation to take place.”
Her writing has sought to recover a place lost not only through exile but through childhood separation from Chile as a diplomat’s daughter. “In Chile I realise I’m a foreigner, even though I understand the codes and can speak with my own accent, and it’s very sad for me to confront that,” Allende says. “I’m a foreigner in the US, too, and always will be. But my roots are more in my books now than in a place; my home will be in my writing.”