Chile, magic & memory: Isabel Allende returns with another finely crafted novel

'My name is Emilia del Valle'  is the latest novel by Isabel Allende, the 83-year old Chilean-American writer.  

Allende became famous after her first novel 'The House of Spirits' published in 1982. Since then, she has written over twenty novels. I have enjoyed reading most of them as well as her autobiographies. Her novels are based on her personal experience of exile, dictatorships, ideological conflicts, civil wars and other such familiar Latin American themes. She has used the signature Latin American genre of Magical Realism in some of her novels.

Emilia del Valle, the protagonist in the novel, is a strong-willed, independent and adventurous woman. She is the daughter of Molly Walsh, a nun in San Francisco who was seduced and made pregnant by Gonzalo Andres del Valle, a wealthy Chilean playboy while on a trip to the US city.  After being  thrown out of the monastery, she gives birth to a daughter whom she names as Emilia del Valle. When the biological father refuses to marry or accept paternity, Molly marries a Mexican school teacher in  San Francisco. Emilia becomes a writer of dime novels and later a journalist. She persuades her newspaper to send her to cover the Chilean civil war of 1891. In Santiago, she meets her father who has given up his adventurous life and taken to religion seriously praying, repenting for his past sins and making confessions to a priest every day. After making a will accepting Emilia as his daughter, he dies in her arms. She inherits a piece of land in a Mapuche forest area in southern Chile. She travels to the forest and discovers the natural beauty of Chile and the culture of the indigenous Mapuche tribe.

Here are some of her descriptions of Chile and Chileans:

-They say that from every corner of Chile one can feel the majestic presence of the Andes Mountains and their telluric energy that defines the proud, serious, and stoic nature of the Chilean people.

-The soul of Chile lies on the sea, the Pacific Ocean, which spans its entire length from the northern border down to the Patagonia. 

- The spirit of Chile is defined by water ...from the sea, blue lakes, raging rivers, waterfalls, springs, persistent rains, snow, and tears...water everywhere, save for that tremendous desert of nitrate.

-He had a lyrical manner of expressing himself that did not seem out of place in that country full of poets. This was something difficult to reconcile, since the same Chileans who so loved the beauty of poetry were also quite bloody-minded.

The author goes poetic in describing the forests in southern Chile as a 'vast expanse of millenary trees, the coigue, canelo, araucaria, hazelnut, and cypresses of the Andes Mountains. Green—a hundred shades of it—and, sometimes, from on high, the blaze of a red copihue, the national flower of Chile. Birds of all varieties, choruses of boisterous song and suddenly the silent flight of an Andean condor. The forest filled with the sound of the trilling of birds, the murmur of foliage, the babbling of brooks and springs. The pure, crisp air like crystal that seeps into every corner of the body and soul, rinsing clean the secret pathways of the veins and thoughts. 

Allende calls Chile as an invented country because she had lived most of her life outside.  She titled her first autobiography  as ¨My invented country¨. Chile has been living in her imagination strongly with nostalgia and melancholy. She looks back at her country more emotionally and intensely to compensate for her forced separation. It became even more acute since Isabel started writing novels only after her exile to Venezuela during the Pinochet military dictatorship. President Allende, overthrown in a coup and killed by the military, was a cousin of her father. 

Allende has brought out how the Chilean oligarchy controls and manipulates its political and economic power using the military to protect and promote their interests at the expense of the poor people. General Pinochet, during his long military dictatorship from 1974 to 1990, has legitimized and promoted the oligarchy’s power and privileges through neoliberal policies and constitution. This is the reason why there has been a historically strong and ongoing leftist movement in the country seeking economic and social justice through protests and resistance and calls for change of the constitution.

Of course, Allende brings out the Latino spirit in the novel with Emilia’s character, romance, love and adventures, similar to her own personal experience. 

Allende is lively even in old age. In one of her interviews, she says,”I have been in love all my life, with different men, of course. Love is beautiful and melodramatic. I am in my seventies and I want love, passion and romance, like any teenager, but match.com is not for me. No one online would ever be interested in a short, bossy Latina grand mother. Now, if I get to meet a guy I like in person, well that’s different. I grab him by the neck, or whatever part of him is closest to me, and he doesn’t stand a chance. We humans are sexual and sentimental creatures to the very end of our lives, a fact that makes my grandchildren cringe."

Allende is proud of her ‘being able to catch a man (Roger Cukras) as the third husband in 2019 when she was 77.  Even now at her advanced age of eighty three years, she lives a free-spirited California life with a full-blooded Latino passion. She says, "all the fundamental things in my life happen in Spanish, like scolding my grandchildren, cooking, making love and writing”. Interestingly, her first husband Willie has built a new house on a hill in San Francisco in the Chilean style and named it as ¨House of Spirits¨, the same name as her first novel which made her popular. 

While her spirit is wild, Allende is rigorously disciplined in her writing work. She works ten hours a day and six days a week. She says, “I get up every morning around six. First I have a cup of coffee, then a shower and then I put on full makeup as if I was going out to the opera. I get dressed and put on high heels, and then I climb the stairs to the attic where I work. I won’t see anyone, not even the mailman, yet I dress up for myself.” She starts work on a new book every year on 8 January. 

The 83-year old Isabel Allende does not let the old age to cloud her Latino heart and creative mind. She believes in the Latino saying, " Don't stop having fun when you are old. You become old only when you stop having fun. She is already into her next project which is going to be another memoir, although she says, "I like to write fiction because I'm a very good liar"

The author is an expert in Latin American affairs

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