About the book
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8 A Conversation with Isabel Allende
Read on
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12 Have You Read? More by Isabel Allende
About the author
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Life at a Glance
William Gordon
ISABEL ALLENDE was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, and raised in Chile. She fled Chile after 1973 assassination of her uncle, President Salvador Allende. She worked in Venezuela from 1975 to 1984 and then moved to the United States. She now lives in California with her husband, Willie Gordon.
She has worked as a TV presenter, journalist, playwright, and children’s author. Her first book for adults, the acclaimed The House of the Spirits, was published in Spanish in 1982 and was translated into twenty-seven languages.
Isabel holds to a very methodical, some would say menacing, literary routine, working Mondays through Saturdays, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. She writes using a computer, seated in what she refers to as a “small cabin off my garden.” Her routine shuns music in favor of silence and stands by at least one superstition: “I always start on January 8.”
Her favorite reads include One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez), The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer), La Lumière des Justes (Henri Troyat), The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Mario Vargas Llosa), and the poetry of Neruda.
She has written Paula: A Memoir, as well as eight novels, among them Zorro, Portrait in Sepia, and Daughter of Fortune. She has also published a celebration of the senses entitled Aphrodite, and My Invented Country, an account of her life in Chile. Her adventure trilogy for children—City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, and Forest of the Pygmies—takes as its themes the environment and ecology.
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Isabel Allende on
Destiny, Personal Tragedy, and Writing
“Life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences”—can you describe that noise, what it is, 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. However, since childhood 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, from a Catholic and conservative 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, like the fact that my father left the family when I was three; the military coup in Chile (1973) that forced me into exile; meeting Willie, my husband; the success of my books; the death of my daughter; and so forth. That is destiny.
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.
There is a lot of autobiographical writing in your books but no actual autobiography. Do you imagine ever writing an autobiography?
Yes, I suppose that one day I will write another memoir. I think that my book Paula has a lot about me. It is a kind of personal memoir, is it not?
After finishing the Jaguar and Eagle trilogy, you returned to writing adult fiction. Do you think you will write for children again and do you have a favorite genre of writing, as a reader or writer?
I don’t know if I will write for kids again. It is not an easy genre. I feel more comfortable writing for adults. I love to write novels with strong plots and characters. I am not a minimalist writer! But as a reader I like many kinds of books, mainly literary fiction. I don’t read romance novels or thrillers. They bore me.
Do you think that fiction writing 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 one 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, to keep in mind the reader and try to grab his or her attention from the very beginning.
How does writing each book change you, if at all?
Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul. Why do I write about certain themes and certain characters only? Because they are part of my life, part of myself; they are aspects of me that I need to explore and understand.
You loved science fiction as an adolescent—do you think it inspired your love of creating other worlds?
Science fiction reinforced the idea—planted by my grandmother—that the universe is very strange and complex. Everything is possible and we know very little. My mind and my heart are open to the mystery.
You always start writing on January 8, but when do you finish? How long does it take you to write your books?
I write approximately a book per year. 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, etc.
Do you have a favorite book of yours?
I don’t read my own books, and as soon as I finish one I am already thinking of the next one. I can hardly remember each book. I don’t have a favorite but I am grateful to The House of the Spirits, my first novel, which paved the way for all the others, and to Paula, because it saved me from depression.
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.
The United States was, to a Chilean, an enemy country in the seventies. How did you overcome that and learn to love it?
I know that most Americans are not responsible for the evil that their government has done or does today abroad. Most people in this country have good intentions, they think of themselves as decent citizens and moral human beings, they want to do good. But there is great ignorance and indifference. The United States has supported in other countries the kind of brutal tyranny that it would never tolerate in its own territory. If Americans were better aware of the atrocities that have been committed in their name and with their tax money, they would be horrified.
“I don’t read my own books, and as soon as I finish one I am already thinking of the next one. I can hardly remember each book.”
Emigrants “lose their crutches” and their past is “erased”—is that both positive and negative?
When one moves to another country as an immigrant, one loses everything that is familiar. To survive one needs to draw strength from within and make double the effort of the locals to get half the results. I think that it is important to remember the past and be proud of one’s roots.
About the book
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A Conversation with Isabel Allende
The following interview, conducted for National Public Radio by Melissa Block, aired November 6, 2006, and is used by permission of NPR.
MELISSA BLOCK: Writer Isabel Allende creates strong women in her novels. Her most famous is The House of the Spirits. Her latest novel, Inés of My Soul, is in the voice of a sixteenth-century woman, Inés Suárez, a Spanish seamstress who goes on to become a conquistador of Chile, Allende’s native country. Inés Suárez was a real figure in history, her story largely lost to time, so Isabel Allende could reimagine it.
ISABEL ALLENDE: The first sentence just popped out of my womb—I wouldn’t say my head—but my womb. It was, I am Inés Suárez, townswoman of the city of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura in the kingdom of Chile. And that’s how I felt. I felt that I was her and that the story could only be told in her voice. This story is so removed in time, and the place also so removed, that the readers would not feel close to the story if it was not told in first person narrative by Inés herself.
“ [Inés] lives in a very cruel time and the conquistadors were brutal. But when they came to America they found also very brutal civilizations there.”
BLOCK: And it is quite a remarkable odyssey that this character takes. How did you first hear about the real life of Inés Suárez?
ALLENDE: Inés Suárez was the only Spanish woman that accompanied 110 conquistadors that founded Chile. They went there in 1540. Inés didn’t leave any writings. She was the mistress of Pedro de Valdivia, the captain general of the conquest in Chile. He wrote many letters to the king, but he never mentioned Inés because it was a clandestine love affair. He was married and his wife remained in Spain. However, he was tried by the Inquisition and there were fifty-nine charges against him, and nine of the charges were because he had this woman, Inés, with him. So there in the records of the Inquisition she’s mentioned extensively. And then by researching the lives of the men that came with her, I could sort of visualize the time and the place and discover her.
BLOCK: The way you tell Inés’s story, she travels from Spain to the New World in 1537. She’s about thirty years old. And she’s going to find out what has happened to her husband, who has gone in search of El Dorado and has disappeared.
ALLENDE: Yes, which was unheard of. At the time women were not allowed to travel alone, and she traveled a long time, all the way from Plasencia, in Spain, to Cuzco, Peru, and then with many adventures in between. And then in Cuzco, she found out that she was a widow. Her husband had died in battle. Instead of returning to Spain, she stayed and had a passionate love affair with a man that was very wealthy and powerful, Pedro de Valdivia. He had a dream of glory. He didn’t care so much for wealth, the social position that he had in Peru, or power. He just wanted glory. He wanted his name in history. And that’s why he decided to go to the end of the world, a place called the Cemetery of Spaniards, Chile. And he goes there with a few men that followed him and this woman at his side.
BLOCK: How do you navigate that tricky line? I mean, she is a conquistador. She is part of a very brutal campaign in Chile against the native people there, even if she’s not actively participating in all of it. She does have moments when she is just as ruthless as some others to protect the people she is with.
ALLENDE: She lives in a very cruel time and the conquistadors were brutal. But when they came to America they found also very brutal civilizations there. The Aztecs were savages really. The Incas in Peru were not as bad, but they were also very repressive and cruel. So the confrontation between these two cultures was very, very violent, and Inés was part of that. I don’t think she questioned it that much. However, when she came to Chile, she developed admiration for the Mapuche, the Indians in Chile, the most fierce in Latin America. Great warriors and people who had no attachment to anything material. She admired their love of the land, their freedom, and the way they lived. But of course it was a time of war. You take sides. And for me as a writer, I had to take both sides. Of course the natural instinct is to be on the side of the Indians, but this happened five hundred years ago and there’s no way that we can change what happened then. We have to try and understand it. I am the product of both cultures. I am mestiza. If I am not mestiza by blood—because my family would deny any Indian blood, although I would be very proud to have it—I am mestiza by culture. I come from both cultures, so I can understand both and I feel entitled to speak for both.
BLOCK: How did you imagine Inés’s motivation in wanting to be part of this conquest of going to Chile and setting up a new society there?
ALLENDE: There is only one motivation. Lust and love. She was in love with this guy, and this is why I would have followed him. Not for any other reason. I don’t think I would go anywhere for gold or fame, but I would go to the end of world following a man that I’m in love with.
BLOCK: And you do have many scenes where Inés’s passion is quite explicitly detailed.
ALLENDE: I think she must have been a very passionate woman to do what she did. First of all to follow her husband, this husband that was like a ghost, to follow him to the end of the world, then to follow Pedro de Valdivia, and finally to marry somebody else and make him happy for thirty years. She must have been a very passionate woman.
BLOCK: When you were writing these scenes of brutality and endless methods of torture and evil doing, did you ever get numb to it yourself?
ALLENDE: No, no. I knew about torture when I was living in Chile during the military coup in 1973. We had had the most solid and the longest democracy in the continent, and in twenty-four hours it ended with a military coup. It was unbelievably violent and cruel. The things that people are able to do to other people! When they passed the “Torture Bill” in the United States—with another name, of course—I was totally horrified because this means that people have no imagination. They cannot visualize what torture really means. So I’ve never been numb to this and when I was describing these things in my book, I was just as horrified as I am now talking to you about them.
BLOCK: How did you get past that then to write about it?
ALLENDE: Well, I write about it because I think that we learn from history. First of all, we realize that things were not very different before and that we make the same mistakes over and over. I think it is very important to look at the past and see what people are capable of doing. Americans are no different from the rest of the world. So we are not saints. And I say we because I am a citizen now. We are not saints. Nobody is. And I think that by writing about these things I sort of exorcise them. I come to terms with the fact that there is evil in our nature and we have to fight against it constantly. We have to be aware of our own evil side.
BLOCK: I’m curious about one last thing about the process of writing and stopping writing. How hard is it for you at the end of a project like this to let go of a character whom you’ve been as involved with as Inés Suárez?
ALLENDE: Oh, it’s so easy, so easy.
BLOCK: Really?
ALLENDE: I never “end” a book, I just give up. After a year with them, I’m fed up with all these people. I don’t want them in my life. I want to get out of the room where I write and start my life again. I’m always delighted when my book is over, and I never read it again. I never go back to it because I’m already in another project.
BLOCK: Well, Isabel Allende, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.
ALLENDE: Thank you, Melissa.
Read on
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Have You Read? More by Isabel Allende
The following books are also available in Spanish from Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and can be found at www.harpercollins.com.
ZORRO
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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 grandmothe
r, 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 Diego’s childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he 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, aka 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 Book Review
PORTRAIT IN SEPIA
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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, free of the limitations that circumscribed the lives of women at that time, but 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, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed, 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.