Photo By: Jessica Chou The Sunday Times.
Disguised in fantastical worlds, Isabelle Allende has laid bare her tumultuous history in her novels while also becoming one of the most acclaimed and loved novelist in all of Latin America. Most recognized by her first novel, The House of Spirits, she now has a repertoire of over 20 books, most of them detailing her relationship and experience with important historical events. The story of this perspective-changing, awe-inspiring artist starts in Lima, Peru on August 2nd, 1942. Despite being born in Peru, her family had deep attachment to Chile given that her parents were both Chilean. Tomas Allende and Francisca Llona got divorced in 1945, and with her three children Francisca “Doña Panchita” Llona relocated to Chile and remarried. Due to her stepfather's position as a diplomat, the family moved often. Namely, Isabel spent her childhood shifting from Bolivia to Lebanon and back to Chile. She started working with the United Nations in the Food and Agriculture organization in Santiago and then Brussels. However, her heart was always connected to the world of books and narratives, therefore she worked as a journalist and translator, slowly but surely gaining notoriety in the country.
Before her breakthrough as a novelist, though, she dedicated herself to interviewing notable figures in Chile, one of them being Pablo Neruda. In a famous and well told account of their interaction, Allende recalls Neruda telling her, “My dear child, you must be the worst journalist in the country. You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do, I suspect you’re not beyond fibbing, and when you don’t have news, you invent it.” Despite the bluntness of the comment, it was the first hint that Allende was meant to follow a more creative path, one which was not confined to the boundaries of fact and fiction. Notwithstanding, Isabel continued on her path to build a picture perfect life with a good husband, a good job, and a good family when her life took an unprecedented turn. Her last name is quite infamous given that her father’s first cousin was Salvador Allende, Chile’s president from 1970 to 1973. Salvador Allende was the first elected Socialist president in all of Latin America, but his extremely liberal policies soon started pushing the country to the brink of an economic collapse. People were hungry, unemployment was high, and morale was low. In 2973, Augusto Pinochet, one of Salvador’s closest advisors carried out a military coup that not only resulted in Salvador Allende’s death, but also in the establishment of Pinochet’s military dictatorship that would rule Chile for seventeen years to come. The start of the dictatorship posed a great threat to all socialists in Chile, and more so if your last name was Allende. The coup kick-started a series of death threats directed towards herself and her family. She attempted at helping people on the “wanted lists” drafted by the dictator by securing them safe passage to other countries, but the threat of violence started getting too close for comfort. Her stepfather was the victim of an assassination plot, and after his near death escape, Allende was forced to flee Chile to Venezuela.
She attempted at continuing her journalistic career in this new country by contributing to a newspaper called El Nacional, but she struggled to find her voice in a world run by men. Allende was always inspired by the strong women in her life, and ever since she was little, she has showed remarkable talent at advocating for women’s rights and has become a vocal feminist. Clara, a clairvoyant character that adds beautiful depth and mystery to her novel, The House of Spirits, was largely based on her grandmother. However, during her stay in Venezuela she was overwhelmed by a tsunami of emotions. Allende decided that she did not want to be confined by the traditional expectations of what her role should be in a family, in marriage, in society, so in 1978 she left to Spain for two years leaving her husband behind. She returned to her marriage empowered but was about to come face to face with the emotions and grief she had left behind when heading to Europe. Her grandfather’s death encouraged her to start writing a letter for him as he died in Chile on January 8th, 1981, but she was unable to go back and see him. A year later she had 500 pages worth of what began as a letter and ended up becoming one of the most critically acclaimed novels in Latin American history. The House of Spirits is a story of love and loss, of extremes and fantasy. Allende herself says that writing this novel helped her process all of her losses. Her grandfather, her country, her family. It was a book based on her need for catharsis, for liberation of the grief that plagued her, for the immense complexity of the situation handed to her. Allende says that she may have never become a writer if she had not left Chile, because before then she had been innocent and blinded to true suffering, all components essential to bring about a transcendent novel, she said, “I don’t think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.”
The House of Spirits became a huge part of what is now known as the Boom Latino, a literary movement that catalyzed the Magic Realism genre. Led by authors like Borges and Garcia Marquez, Allende was not only innovating in literature, she was also breaking barriers as one of the most successful female authors in Latin America. Her work began to be compared to Garcia Marquez, a Colombian author who won the Nobel Literature Prize for One Hundred Years of Solitude. The House of Spirit’s immense success did not give her a false sense of hope, though, as she continued to work at her day job, worried that it may have been a fluke, a glitch in the system, beginners luck. Nevertheless, she continued writing and produced best-seller after best-seller. It seemed that Allende had already exhausted her reservoir of suffering, but fate was crafting a dark twist to her life that would once again turn her world upside down. One of Isabel’s daughters, Paula, suffered from porphyria, a liver disorder that affects the skin and nervous system. Complications led to her inevitable deterioration, and Isabel once again turned to writing as an escape, or as a venting source for her grief. Paula died in 1992 leaving Allende in a suspended trance, she says “All the color was gone from my life. All days seemed alike. She had been in a coma for a year, and I had taken care of her at home. A month later my mother gave me back 180 letters I had sent her during that year, and I started writing.” These letters once again culminated in a raw, painful, enlightening book called Paula. Using the profits that came from the sales, in her daughter’s honor, Isabel created the Isabel Allende foundation that is dedicated to “supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected.”
Her books also include, The Island Beneath the Sea, The Japanese Lover, and a Long Petal of the Sea, all blends of historical fiction and emotion that connect with the reader’s innermost soul. In addition to changing the way women are perceived both in literature and in work situations, crafting deep and thoughtful narratives, and exposing her experiences in an attempt to reconcile with the world, Isabel Allende is also the recipient of Chile’s National Literature Prize and the United States' Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to her by Barack Obama in 2014. Allende now lives in California with her third husband, her children all nearby, in an attempt to prevent further separation that has plagued them their whole lives. Allende is a free-flowing spirit who embraces her power, her femininity, her unapologetic uniqueness. Readers all around the world are waiting for her next move. A novel? A magazine? An interview? It is up to her, and we are all waiting to welcome more of her wonderful work into the literary world.
Written By: Carolina Mejia Rodriguez
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