Allende mixes memory & imagination
Noted author credits unhappy childhood, strange family as reasons she became a writer
Born in Lima, Peru, to a father who was a diplomat from Chile, Isabel Allende bounced around during her childhood, spending time in Chile, Bolivia and Lebanon. She and her family were displaced by political upheavals and violence, including the 1973 assassination of her uncle Salvador Allende. She worked as a journalist in Chile and Venezuela and later earned international recognition with the 1982 publication of The House of the Spirits, a book that began as a letter to her dying grandfather. She eventually moved to Northern California and married lawyer Willie Gordon in 1988.
Allende addresses a packed Kresge Auditorium.
BY BARBARA PALMER
In more than a dozen best-selling books that have been translated into 27 languages, Isabel Allende writes with "perhaps as broad a palette as that of any novelist in the past generation," said Roland Greene, professor of English and comparative literature, as he introduced the author to thundering applause in Kresge Auditorium last week.
And, in presenting the final Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts for the academic year, Allende made full use of her range. In a talk titled "A Sense of Place," her remarks were witty, sensual, lyrical and politically pointed -- sometimes nearly all in the same sentence.
Allende, 61, thanked the Associated Students for co-sponsoring her visit -- "I hate to be invited by the old farts only" -- as she began a talk that examined the roles that memory, imagination and the sense of herself as an outsider have played in her life and work. Many of the lecture's anecdotes and observations are contained in Allende's 2003 memoir, My Invented Country.
"Being a perpetual foreigner has marked my life and my writing," said Allende, who was born in Lima, Peru, where her father was a diplomatic official to Chile. She went to Santiago, Chile, with her mother at a young age and later lived in Bolivia, Lebanon, Venezuela and, since the late 1980s, in Northern California. She fled political violence many times, she said, including from Chile in 1975, following the 1973 assassination of her cousin, Salvador Allende.
The author, who had worked as a journalist in Chile and Venezuela, came to international attention with the 1982 publication of The House of the Spirits. Allende wrote the book while living in Venezuela, begun as a letter to her grandfather when she learned that he was dying in Chile. Isolated and lonely, "I felt that my life was a failure," she said. "The feeling of nostalgia was paralyzing." Her first novel was an "attempt to recover the country and the family I had lost."
"I am a writer because I was blessed with an unhappy childhood and a strange family -- with a relatives as weird as mine, you don't need to invent anything," Allende said. "They alone provide all the material for magic realism.
"I don't know how much of my memory is actual fact and how much I have invented." Memory and imagination are similar processes in the brain, she said. "Our story is subjective. ... We pick the adjectives to describe our journey and in doing so, we create our own legend."
Since moving to the United States, where she married lawyer Willie Gordon in 1988, Allende has written 10 books -- and plans to write 10 more, she said. The works in a trilogy she currently is writing for young adults are based in the Himalayas, the Amazon and Africa. She chooses such locales to take readers out of their comfort zones, she said. "It is good to experience the world. In doing so we learn that everywhere people are similar and everybody wants the same thing. ... We are all odd creatures."
In her talk, Allende painted a many-layered portrait of herself as a hot-tub loving Californian who both meditates and owns a fur hat. ("I didn't kill the fox, though. Somebody else did.") An austere childhood in Chile filled with cold showers, tough meat, bumpy mattresses and sturdy shoes made her "grateful for even the most insignificant pleasures, like warm water coming out of the faucet," she said. "I don't fit in California; I order steak." But after a week in Chile, "I feel like a stranger. I crave tofu and green tea.
"I look Chilean, I dream, cook, make love and write in Spanish. Most of my stories are distinctively Latin American in origin and flavor -- but I probably belong to the United States more than I ever have belonged anywhere else."
It took years to adapt, she said. "Americans' sense of time is very peculiar. ... You have no patience. Take food and sex, for example. You want it fast and you want quantity over quality. Americans have invented two terms that have no translation in any other language: 'snack' and 'quickie.'"
For years, she couldn't see much difference between Democrats and Republicans, she said. "It took George W. Bush to wake me up." She now calls herself an active dissident. "I don't like the direction this country is going. But I do not feel powerless. I know that I can make a difference, because each determined person can. ... I have the right to try and change what I don't like and I have a voice."
In the United States she will always be an outsider, "but it is good for my writing," she said. She would not be a novelist if it weren't for the military coup that forced her to leave her country, she said. "If I had not been forced by circumstance to start anew several times, I would not have been able to create my own story.
"Literature has defined me word by word, page by page. I have invented this hyperbolic, flamboyant me.
"Storytelling is a passion, like motherhood. I write because I love it, because if I didn't my soul would dry up and die." Rootless herself, "I want to know what happens and to whom, why it happened and where. I want the human story preserved, told and retold.
"I have planted my roots in my books," Allende said. "For my writing I use my own experience transformed by imagination and I steal other people's lives. With that raw material I have been able to build a place that I can call my motherland."
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