“To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story.” —The Stories of Eva Luna (187)
Isabel Allende is a writer in love with the magic of storytelling. The Chilean author has written 26 books and has been translated into over 42 languages, making her arguably the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. Her remarkable debut novel The House of the Spirits (1982, first translated into English by Magda Bogin in 1985) was an instant bestseller and immediately established her literary reputation as a key voice in magical realism. In Allende’s novels and short stories, the fantastical exists side by side with the cultural and historical milieu of the Chile she grew up in, to the point where they become inextricably linked.
These are stories where ghosts and spirits can be contacted telepathically, women can bring powerful dictators to their knees with magical words, and prehistoric beasts from the mythical city of El Dorado help save an Indigenous tribe of the Amazon rainforest.
Allende’s books are a joy to read. They are playful, humorous and sensual, and often engage creatively with genre, whether it’s by reimagining the iconic swashbuckling hero in the eponymous Zorro (2005, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) or using the framework of YA to address environmentalism and Indigenous rights in City of the Beasts (2002, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) and its two sequels. But the common thread running through all her books is the power of storytelling as a force which shapes how we perceive the world around us. Whether fairy tales or family history, the act of telling stories is transformative to both the teller and the listener. It is this potential for transformation that gives Allende’s novels their political power, their ability to reclaim the narrative of history from the colonisers and dictators and give a voice to the ordinary people, the women, the Indigenous peoples and the working class of Latin America who are too often silenced. As Allende writes in “The Short Story”: “We are all united by the same secret vice, our love of stories. But there is nothing to be ashamed of. Mankind has been trapped in the web of storytelling since our hairy grandparents sat around the fire in the long winters of the stone age. We are the privileged ones that get to weave the web.”
The House of the Spirits
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously – as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory. (432)
The House of the Spirits remains one of Allende’s best loved books, and with good reason. Drawing on Gabriel García Márquez’s wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1970), The House of the Spirits is a family epic mixing the history of Chile with Allende’s own family history to weave a wondrous tapestry of story. The novel follows four generations of the Trueba family, from the patriarch Esteban Trueba first establishing his fortune in the mines and on his estate at Tres Marias, through to his granddaughter Alba who responds to the trauma of being kidnapped by the military police following the country’s violent coup by reconstructing her family’s history. Though the Latin American country the book is set in is never explicitly named in the novel, the parallels of the socialist government being overthrown by a military coup with General Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973 are pretty explicit, especially given that Allende, herself related to the previous President Salvador Allende, like Alba in the novel helped people who had been put on the military’s wanted lists to escape until she herself had to flee to Venezuela.
Esteban and Alba provide The House of the Spirits with the two main narrative voices, and the novel explores the tension between Esteban’s perspective as a self-made man and the family’s patriarch, which conveys a traditional, conservative, masculine view of the world, and Alba’s reconstruction of the family history from her grandmother Clara’s journals and notebooks, which offers a feminist, socialist corrective to Esteban’s blinkered perspective. While Esteban sees the Trueba family history as being about his personal struggles, Allende makes it clear that it is much more the story of the remarkable women of the family and the lives they have carved for themselves around and in resistance to Esteban’s patriarchal rules and values.
Clara del Valle, who marries Esteban and bears his daughter Blanca, is a telekinetic clairvoyant. Her ability to see the future saves the family multiple times, and her ability to talk to ghosts and spirits connects her to the del Valle and Trueba family ancestors and gives the novel and the sprawling Trueba house on the corner its name. Clara’s love for her family keeps them together through the country’s social and political upheavals and their various changes in fortune. Blanca, Clara and Esteban’s daughter, provides the novel with its great romance, her passionate and lifelong love for Pedro Tercero García, the son of the foreman who works at the Tres Marias estate. Their forbidden love transcends their different classes, and persists despite Esteban’s violent objections. Alba, Blanca’s daughter (and the character closest to Allende herself), is both the novel’s narrator and its social conscience, the horrors of military dictatorship driving her to action as she works tirelessly to save as many people as she can from the brutality of the regime, even managing to drag the ethereal Clara and the passionate Blanca into the practicalities of sheltering dissidents and getting them safely out of the country.
City of the Beast, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, and Forest of the Pygmies
He couldn’t put his trust in reason after having experienced the hazy territory of dreams, intuition, and magic. Destiny was a fact, and there were times you had to jump into an adventure and get out whatever way you could, the way he had when he was four and his grandmother had pushed him into the pool and he had had to swim or else. There was no other way but to dive into the mysteries that lay ahead. (250)
Allende’s YA trilogy, starting with City of the Beasts and continuing with Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004) and Forest of the Pygmies (2005), demonstrates her remarkable versatility and her ability to adapt her work to a younger audience without losing any of the power and elegance of her writing. The heroes of the series are Alexander Cold, an American teenager who is sent off to live with his eccentric grandmother Kate, and his friend Nadia Santos, the daughter of a Brazilian guide he meets when Kate whisks him off to the Amazon jungle as part of an assignment for International Geographic. City of the Beasts follows Alex and Nadia’s adventures in the Amazon, where they uncover a nefarious plot by a businessman to use biological warfare to wipe out an Indigenous tribe so that he can mine their traditional lands. In the sequel, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, Alex and Nadia travel to the Himalayas and have to stop a Western collector from stealing the Forbidden Kingdom’s golden dragon statue. In the final volume, Forest of the Pygmies, they travel to the wilds of Kenya to rescue a Pygmy tribe who are being blackmailed into illegal poaching by corrupt officials.
All three books explore environmentalism and Indigenous rights, with Alex and Nadia each time learning how the perspectives of the Indigenous peoples they encounter allow them to live in harmony with the environment, in stark contrast to the exploitative and extractive perspective of the series’ Western capitalist antagonists. Though their coming-of-age narrative is undeniably less complex than the sprawling multigenerational epic of The House of the Spirits, the books in the City of the Beasts series never talk down to their younger readers, introducing their audience to the evils of colonialism and the importance of resistance whilst tackling heavy themes like genocide. Allende balances this with her sharp storytelling instinct, embracing more traditional fantasy ideas and tropes like magical cities and quest narratives with joyful enthusiasm, and portraying her characters—both admirable and deplorable—with depth and nuance.
Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna
And at that moment, as if she knew everything, she said to him, Fear is stronger than desire, than love or hatred or guilt or rage, stronger than loyalty. Fear is all-consuming […] and he felt her tears rolling down his neck. Everything stopped: she had touched his most deeply hidden wound. (136)
The novel Eva Luna (1987, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden in 1988) and Allende’s only short story collection The Stories of Eva Luna (1989, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden in 1991) together form Allende’s tribute to One Thousand and One Nights, with the titular protagonist as Allende’s modern-day Scheherazade. Eva, like Allende, is a storyteller who witnesses great social and political upheaval in Latin America during the 20th century and uses her fantastical stories to escape from the traumas she has lived through—but also to comment on the injustices around her and attempt to redress the balance.
Eva Luna tells the story of Eva’s life, from being orphaned at age six through to aiding guerrilla fighters in the revolution and eventually meeting and falling in love with journalist Rolf Carlé. Eva’s stories are woven throughout, as she discovers through writing a means of helping herself and others process the trauma of civil war and a way of imagining a better future. The Stories of Eva Luna is a short story collection, framed as the stories that Eva tells her lover Rolf to entertain him while they share intimate moments. The two books can be read separately, but read together the reader can more clearly see how Eva’s individual stories reflect the concerns and struggles of her life, and the short stories obliquely provide readers with extra insight into the interactions and relationship between the novels two leads, making their romance feel more real and convincing.
Allende, as Eva, writes short stories that (like their precursors in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights) are lyrical, fun, and sexy, but with a subversive undercurrent. The stories are beautifully told, mixing sharply observed depictions of Latin American life with fantastical elements straight out of fairy tales or fables. A priest who devotes his life to helping the poor is miraculously cured of blindness. A woman beloved of a dictator disappears into an invisible house. And a doctor requires the help of Indigenous magic to save the woman he loves. But for all their whimsical charm, the stories double as tongue-in-cheek satires on Latin American masculinity. Many of the stories focus on the working-class women whom dictators, generals, and other powerful militaristic men fall in love with, who must use their charm and cunning to reclaim their own agency.
Eva’s stories portray women in all sorts of situations taking control of their lives through unconventional means—like Scheherazade, often having to make use of their sexuality and their intelligence to reclaim their narratives in a deeply patriarchal culture. Eva herself appears as a supporting character in a number of the less fantastical stories, and the final tale in the collection relates a tragic incident in Rolf and Eva’s life that takes place after the end of the novel, calling into question how much of Eva’s tales are made up and how much they reflect the world around her. The tragedy of the final story also serves to reflect upon why both Eva and Allende tell stories, driving home the idea that narratives help us make sense of a world that is frequently tragic and grossly unfair, so that we may bear witness to those who suffer and make sure they are remembered.
Allende’s other books run the gamut of genres, from the pulpy adventures of Zorro to the more traditional historical fiction in books like The Japanese Lover (2015) and Inés of My Soul (2006), a fictionalisation of the life of Spanish conquistadora Inés Suárez, to the heartbreaking memoir Paula (1994) about the death of Allende’s daughter. Like the works above, they are united by Allende’s wonderful use of language, her sharp characterisation, and the feminist and anti-colonialist themes that are so important to her. Like the house on the corner in her debut novel, constantly being rebuilt and repurposed by successive generations of the Trueba family and the colourful characters who find themselves in their orbit, Allende’s writing is warm and welcoming, but full of strange secrets, hidden layers, and surprising diversions. Like the house’s many eccentric guests, unsuspecting readers may find themselves drawn in only to become lost in her many compelling worlds. It’s a fate I would highly advise to any adventurous fantasy reader.
Jonathan Thornton has written for the websites The Fantasy Hive, Fantasy Faction, and Gingernuts of Horror. He works with mosquitoes and is working on a PhD on the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction.
