“More debts, Mike?”
“We’re used to it; what’s one more stripe to the tiger?”
“You mean we keep up the fight!” I smiled, aware that this time it would be on my own terms.
You know the rest, because we’ve lived it together. The night we met, you asked me to tell you my story. It’s very long, I warned you. That’s all right, I have a lot of time, you said, not suspecting what you were getting into when you walked into this infinite plan.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
Isabel Allende on Destiny, Personal Tragedy, and Writing
About the book
A Conversation with Isabel Allende
Read on
Excerpt: Island Beneath the Sea
Have You Read?
More by Isabel Allende
About the author
Isabel Allende on Destiny, Personal Tragedy, and Writing
Photo by © William Gordon
“Life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.” Can you describe that noise, what it is, and what it means to you?
We have very busy lives—or we make them very busy. There is noise and activity everywhere. Few people know how to be still and find a quiet place inside themselves. From that place of silence and stillness the creative forces emerge. There we find faith, hope, strength, and wisdom. Since childhood, however, we are taught to do things. Our heads are full of noise. Silence and solitude scare most of us.
You often talk and write about destiny. What is destiny for you?
We are born with a set of cards and we have the freedom to play them the best we can, but we cannot change them. I was born female in the forties into a conservative Catholic family in Chile. I was born healthy. I had my shots as a child. I received love and a proper education. All that determines who I am. The really important events in my life happened in spite of me. I had no control over them: the fact that my father left the family when I was three; the 1973 military coup in Chile that forced me into exile; meeting my husband Willie; the success of my books; the death of my daughter; and so forth. That is destiny.
“The really important events in my life happened in spite of me. I had no control over them.”
Just before your daughter, Paula, went into a coma, she said, “I look everywhere for God but can’t find him.” Do you, can you, have faith in God after such a tragedy?
Faith has nothing to do with being happy or not. Faith is a gift. Some people receive it and some don’t. I imagine that a tragedy like losing a child is more bearable if you believe in God because you can imagine that your child is in heaven.
Do you think that fiction has a moral purpose? Or can it simply be entertainment?
It can be just entertainment, but when fiction makes you think, it is much more exciting. However, beware of authors who pound their “moral messages” into you.
You have written letters all your life, most notably a daily letter to your mother. You’ve also worked as a journalist. Which form or experience of writing helped you most when you started writing books?
The training of writing daily is very useful. As a journalist I learned to research, to be disciplined, to meet deadlines, to be precise and direct, and to keep in mind the reader and try to grab his or her attention from the very beginning.
Does writing each book change you?
Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul. Why do I write only about certain themes and certain characters? Because they are part of my life, part of myself, they are aspects of me that I need to explore and understand.
“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”
You always start writing on January 8th, but when do you finish? How long does it take you to write your books?
I write approximately a book per year, but it takes me several years to research a theme. It takes me three or four months to write the first draft, then I have to correct and edit. I write in Spanish, so I also have to work closely with my English translator, Margaret Sayers Peden. And then I have to spend time on book tours, interviews, traveling, et cetera.
Do you have a favorite among your books?
I don’t read my own books. As soon as I finish one I am already thinking of the next. I can hardly remember each book. I don’t have a favorite, but I am grateful to my first novel, The House of the Spirits, which paved the way for all the others, and to Paula, because it saved me from depression.
“I don’t read my own books. As soon as I finish one I am already thinking of the next.”
You grew up in Chile but now live in the United States. Which country has had the most influence on your writing and why?
It is very easy for me to write about Chile. I don’t have to think about it. The stories just flow. My roots are in Chile and most of my books have a Latin American flavor. However, I have lived in the United States for many years, I read mainly English fiction, I live in English, and certainly that influences my writing.
About the book
A Conversation with Isabel Allende
Which of your male characters do you like best? Remember that Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”
Gregory Reeves, in The Infinite Plan. I like him so much that in real life, I married him some years ago, and not even marriage has made me stop liking him.
The Infinite Plan is based on the life of your husband, William Gordon. How much is fiction and how much reality?
I don’t honestly know. I think all my books, with the exception of Eva Luna and a few stories, are much more reality than fiction. In The Infinite Plan, the characters are based on human models, and nearly everything that happens is real. Sometimes I needed two people to create a character, as was the case with Carmen/Tamar. The models were Carmen Alvarez, a childhood friend of Willie’s, and Tabra Tunoa, my good friend, who gave me her biography to use for Tamar. Gregory Reeves was very easy, since Willie was the model. . . . I didn’t have to invent the character; it was there, waiting for me. No need to exhaust my imagination.
“In The Infinite Plan, the characters are based on human models, and nearly everything that happens is real.”
What was Willie’s reaction when he read the book? Weren’t you afraid he would be horrified to find himself exposed in those pages, with all his problems and faults?
My mother said it would lead to a divorce, but none of it was a surprise to him because we had discussed each chapter. When I met him and he began to tell me the story of his life, I knew I had to write it, and I think that was why I fell so quickly and deeply in love. From the very beginning, I told him what I had in mind; there was nothing hidden. I spent four years sleeping with that story, checking details, asking questions, visiting the places where events had occurred, interviewing dozens of people. When he read the book, Willie told me, he was deeply moved: “This is a map of my life; now I understand where I’ve been.” The danger with that, of course, is that now he thinks he’s Gregory Reeves and goes around worrying about who will play him in the film. He thinks Paul Newman is a little short. . . .
“When I met [Willie] and he began to tell me the story of his life, I knew I had to write it, and I think that was why I fell so quickly and deeply in love.”
Taken from Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits, Celia Correas Zapata, Arte Publico Press, 2002
Read on:
Excerpt: Island Beneath the Sea
Read on for a preview of Island Beneath the Sea, Isabel Allende’s new novel, available in hardcover in May 2010 from HarperCollins Publishers.
Zarité
In my forty years I, Zarité Sedella, have had better luck than other slaves. I am going to have a long life and my old age will be a time of contentment because my star—mi z’etoile—also shines when the night is cloudy. I know the pleasure of being with the man my heart has chosen. His large hands awaken my skin. I have had four children and a grandson, and those who are living are free. My first memory of happine
ss, when I was just a bony, runny-nosed, tangle-haired little girl, is moving to the sound of the drums, and that is also my most recent happiness, because last night I was in the Place Congo dancing and dancing, without a thought in my head, and today my body is warm and weary. Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me. With the drums the everyday Zarité disappears, and I am again the little girl who danced when she barely knew how to walk. I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles. Rhythm is born on the island beneath the sea; it shakes the earth, it cuts through me like a lighting bolt and rises toward the sky, carrying with it my sorrows so that Papa Bondye can chew them, swallow them, and leave me clean and happy. The drums conquer fear. The drums are the heritage of my mother, the strength of Guinea that is in my blood. No one can harm me when I am with the drums, I become as overpowering as Erzulie, loa of love, and swifter than the bullwhip. The shells on my wrists and ankles click in time, the gourds ask questions, the djembe drums answer in the voice of the jungle and the timbales with their tin tones. The djun djuns that know how to speak make the invitation, and the big maman roars when they beat her to summon the loas. The drums are sacred, the loas speak through them.
“Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.”
“The drums conquer fear. The drums are the heritage of my mother, the strength of Guinea that is in my blood. No one can harm me when I am with the drums . . .”
In the house where I spent my earliest years the drums were silent in the room we shared with Honoré, the other slave, but they were often taken out. Madame Delphine, my mistress then, did not want to hear the blacks’ noise, only the melancholy laments of her clavichord. Mondays and Tuesdays she gave classes to girls of color, and the rest of the week she taught in the mansions of the grand blancs, where the mademoiselles had their own instruments because they could not use the ones the mulatta girls touched. I learned to clean the keys with lemon juice, but I could not make music because Madame forbade us to go near her clavichord. We didn’t need it. Honoré could draw music from a cookpot; anything in his hands had beat, melody, rhythm, and voice. He carried sounds inside his body; he had brought them from Dahomey. My toy was a hollowed gourd we made to rattle; later he taught me to caress his drums, slowly. And from the beginning, when he was still carrying me around in his arms, he took me to dances and voodoo services, where he marked the rhythm with his drum, the principal drum, for others to follow. This is how I remember it. Honoré seemed very old to me because his bones had frozen stiff, even though at the time he was no older than I am now. He drank taffia in order to endure the pain of moving, but more than that harsh rum, music was the best remedy. His moans turned to laughter with the sound of the drums. Honoré barely could peel sweet potatoes for the mistress’s meal, his hands were so deformed, but playing the drum he never got tired, and when it came to dancing no one lifted his knees higher, or swung his head with more force, or shook his behind with more pleasure. Before I knew how to walk, he had me dance sitting down, and when I could just balance myself on two legs he invited me to lose myself in the music, the way you do in a dream. “Dance, dance, Zarité, the slave who dances is free . . . while he is dancing,” he told me. I have always danced.
“His moans turned to laughter with the sound of the drums.”
Have You Read?
More by Isabel Allende
DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE
An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, young, vivacious Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Entering a rough-and-tumble world of new arrivals driven mad by gold fever, Eliza moves in a society of single men and prostitutes with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi’en. California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence for the young Chilean, and her search for her elusive lover gradually turns into another kind of journey. By the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.
“An extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the nineteenth-century world. . . . Entertaining and well paced . . . compelling.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A rich cast of characters . . . a pleasurable story. . . . In Daughter of Fortune, Allende has continued her obsession with passion and violence.”
—New York Times Book Review
PORTRAIT IN SEPIA
As a young girl Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment. Aurora is free of the limitations that circumscribed the lives of women at that time, but is tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past and to discover exactly what it was all those years ago that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed and epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.
“Rich with color and emotion and packed with intriguing characters.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
ZORRO
Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is a child of two worlds. His father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe, while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during a childhood filled with mischief and adventure, that Diego witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage.
At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege.
Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures—duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues—Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.
“Allende’s discreetly subversive talent really shows. . . . You turn the pages, cheering on the masked man.”
—Los Angeles Times
INÉS OF MY SOUL
This magisterial work of historical fiction recounts the astonishing life of Inés Suarez, a daring Spanish conquistadora who toiled to build the nation of Chile—and whose vital role has too often been neglected by history.
It is the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and when Inés’s shiftless husband disappears to the New World, she uses the opportunity to search for him as an excuse to flee her stifling homeland and seek adventure. After a treacherous journey to Peru, she learns of his death in battle. She meets and begins a passionate love affair with a man who seeks only honor and glory: Pedro Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro. Together, Inés and Valdivia will build the new city of Santiago and wage a ruthless war against the indigenous Chileans. The horrific struggle will change them forever, pulling them toward separate destinies.
Inés of My Soul is a work of breathtaking scope, written with the narrative brilliance a
nd passion readers have come to expect from Isabel Allende.
“Riveting . . . it simply captivates. . . . A colorful and clear-eyed portrait of a woman and a country.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
APHRODITE: A MEMOIR OF THE SENSES
Under the aegis of the Goddess of Love, Isabel Allende uses her storytelling skills brilliantly in Aphrodite to evoke the delights of food and sex. After considerable research and study she has become an authority on aphrodisiacs, which include everything from food and drink to stories and, of course, love. Readers will find here recipes from Allende’s mother, poems, stories from ancient and foreign literature, paintings, personal anecdotes, fascinating tidbits on the sensual art of food and its effect on amorous performance, tips on how to attract your mate and revive flagging virility, passages on the effect of smell on libido, a history of alcoholic beverages, and much more.
“Allende turns the joyous preparation and consumption of fine food into an erotic catalyst.”
—New York Times Book Review
PAULA: A MEMOIR
With an enchanting blend of magic realism, politics, and romance reminiscent of her classic bestseller The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende presents a soul-baring memoir that seizes the reader like a novel of suspense.
Written for her daughter, Paula, when she became ill and slipped into a coma, Paula is the colorful story of Allende’s life—from her early years in her native Chile, through the turbulent military coup of 1973, to the subsequent dictatorship and her family’s years of exile. In the telling, bizarre ancestors reveal themselves, delightful and bitter childhood memories surface, enthralling anecdotes of youthful years are narrated, and intimate secrets are softly whispered.
In an exorcism of death and a celebration of life, Isabel Allende explores the past and questions the gods. She creates a magical book that carries the reader from tears to laughter, and from terror through sensuality to wisdom. In Paula, readers will come to understand that the miraculous world of her novels is the world Isabel Allende inhabits—it is her enchanted reality.