She had married Ernesto, a Spaniard and lived in Madrid. The occasion for all this outpouring of memories which form themselves into good stories is 1992, the year of Paula’s terrible affliction. She re-creates in graphic prose the violent coup of the generals against the presidency of her uncle, Salvador Allende, which exiled her and then her family to a long residence in Venezuela and, with the blossoming of her career as a writer, her final settlement in California. She tells Paula about her own parents and colorful grandparents, her childhood and youth in Santiago, Chile, her loves and marriages. Seated day after day at her daughter’s bedside, Allende uses the unresponsive and empty time to review her life. Admirers of her fiction, and scholars-to-come of her oeuvre, may use this new book to explain the origin of the characters in her work: “The House of the Spirits,” “Of Love and Shadows,” “Eva Luna” and “The Infinite Plan.” It will serve as fictional source material, while at the same time bringing her life up-to-date, stemming from the dying and death of her beloved young married daughter, Paula. Isabel Allende’s beautiful and heart-rending memoir supplies ample evidence for those of that conviction. Such readers search authors’ life-stories for clues to their seemingly imaginative fiction, certain that, if only they knew enough of the authors’ real lives they could account for every detail that appears on the pages of novels. Many people believe that fiction arises out of somewhat well-disguised autobiography.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |