Friday Fiction: Isabel Allende, Magical Realist

--by Hanje Richards

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Sometime in the early 1980s, I read House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It was my first exposure to “magical realism” and it just about blew my mind. I have remembered this book fondly and have thought about it often over the years. Since then, I have also read Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia and Eva Luna. Writer of fiction and memoir, Allende writes about love and loss beautifully.

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Isabel Allende is a great storyteller and her books are populated with interesting characters. If you like getting lost in a different time, a different place, and sometimes even a different reality when you read, you may enjoy some of these books by this week’s featured author.

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Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses - Sex and food, once celebrated as two of life's great joys, suffer a lot of bad press these days. In this sophisticated defense of pleasure, novelist Allende puts the joy back into eating and loving with all the panache that marks the best of her fiction. Though passionate about her subject, she remains consistently whimsical with this mix of anecdotes, recipes and advice designed to enhance any romantic encounter. Her book is filled with wisdom and laughs. Allende comes down emphatically for romance over sex and for ritual over flavor in a work that succeeds in being what it intends to be: fun from the first nibble to the last.

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Daughter of Fortune - An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, vivacious young 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 to 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.

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The House of the Spirits - In 1981, when Allende learned that her grandfather was on his deathbed, she started writing him a letter, which eventually became the bestselling House of the Spirits.

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A best seller and critical success all over the world, The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family – their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times – a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all.

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Ines of My Soul - In the early years of the conquest of the Americas, Inés Suárez, a seamstress condemned to a life of toil, flees Spain to seek adventure in the New World. As Inés makes her way to Chile, she begins a fiery romance with Pedro de Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro. Together the lovers will build the new city of Santiago, and they will wage war against the indigenous Chileans – a bloody struggle that will change Inés and Valdivia forever, inexorably pulling each of them toward separate destinies.

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The Infinite Plan - Gregory Reeves, the son of a self-styled preacher, struggles to overcome his childhood of poverty and neglect and to take control of his destiny. Gregory's journey is marked by the contending philosophies of his mother's Bahai faith; his father's personally revealed, metaphysical explanation of the universe, called "The Infinite Plan" (the selling of which provides the family's income); and the traditional Catholicism and sense of nostalgia that permeate the Latin barrio where Gregory lives as a child.

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My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile - Here are the almost mythic figures of a Chilean family – grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends – with whom readers of Allende's fiction will feel immediately at home. And here, too, is an unforgettable portrait of a charming, idiosyncratic Chilean people with a violent history and an indomitable spirit. Although she claims to have been an outsider in her native land – "I never fit in anywhere, not into my family, my social class, or the religion fate bestowed on me" – Allende carries with her even today the mark of the politics, myth, and magic of her homeland. In My Invented County, she explores the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping her life, her books, and that most intimate connection to her place of origin.

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Of Love and Shadows - Isabel Allende transports us to a Latin American country in the grip of a military dictatorship, where Irene Beltran, an upper-class journalist, and Francisco Leal, photographer son of a Marxist professor, together discover a hideous crime. They also discover how far they dare go in search of the truth in a nation of terror... and how very much they risk.

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Paula - A unforgettable memoir, an exquisitely rendered, deeply moving mother-daughter story that doubles as Isabel Allende’s autobiography, Paula is a soul-baring memoir one reads without drawing a breath, like a novel of suspense. The point of departure for these moving pages is a tragic personal experience. In December 1991, Allende's daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and shortly thereafter fell into a coma. During hours in the hospital, the author began to write the story of her family for her unconscious daughter...

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As an exorcism of death, in these pages Allende explores the past and questions the gods. The result is a magical book that carries the reader from tears to laughter, from terror to sensuality and wisdom. Paula is a prodigious evocation and a hymn to life.

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Portrait in Sepia - This is a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile and a marvelous family saga peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits. As a young girl, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that has 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 circumscribe 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.

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Sum of Our Days – In this work, Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul as she shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory – and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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Zorro - A child of two worlds – the son of an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner and a Shoshone warrior woman – young Diego de la Vega cannot silently bear the brutal injustices visited upon the helpless in late-eighteenth-century California. And so a great hero is born – skilled in athleticism and dazzling swordplay, his persona formed between the Old World and the New – the legend known as Zorro.