{"id":37,"date":"2008-04-23T13:20:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T17:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/spanish\/?p=37"},"modified":"2008-04-23T13:20:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T17:20:00","slug":"chilean-writer-isabel-allende","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/spanish\/chilean-writer-isabel-allende\/","title":{"rendered":"Chilean Writer: Isabel Allende"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Ever heard of Isabel Allende? She\u00b4s my favorite author in Spanish. Isabel was born in the early 40\u00b4s and was the daughter of Francisca Barros and Tom\u00e1s Allende, who was Chilean ambassador to Peru. For political reasons, she lived in Bolivia and Lebanon until 1958, when she moved back to Chile to finish her secondary education. In 1962 she married her first husband, Miguel Fr\u00edas and besides being a mother she also became a well-known TV personality, a dramatist and a journalist on a feminist magazine.
\nBecause of her relation to Salvador Allende (he was her uncle), she received death threats after the military coup in 1973, and decided to live in Venezuela, where she stayed for 13 years. During a visit to the US in the late 80\u00b4s she met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon.
\nIsabel writes in the \u201cmagic realism\u201d tradition and this was what caught me from the very start. Take it from me, once you start reading one of her books, you won\u00b4t be able to put it down and if your Spanish is fluent enough you\u00b4ll be simply blown away! The first ones I read were \u201cEva Luna<\/a>\u201d, \u201cThe Stories of Eva Luna<\/a>\u201d, \u201cThe Daughter of Fortune<\/a>\u201d and \u201cPortrait in Sepia<\/a>\u201d. They\u00b4re independent readings but when you read them you\u00b4ll see recurring characters in all of them.
The House of the Spirits<\/a>, written by Isabel Allende, was released in 1983
\nand became a movie <\/a>in 1992, with a star-clad cast including Meryl Streep,
\nJeremy Irons, Wynona Rider and Antonio Banderas, among others. The novel starts
\nand ends with the same sentence: \u201cBarrab\u00e1s lleg\u00f3 a la familia por la v\u00eda
\nmaritima\u201d. It is a compilation of Esteban Trueba\u00b4s writings, his wife\u00b4s Clara\u00b4s
\njournal entries and also his granddaughter\u00b4s Alba\u00b4s notes. As the book is a
\ncompilation of different authors\u00b4 writings, the point of view changes without
\nprevious notice.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is said that when Isabel Allende got a letter
\nsaying that her ninety-year-old grandfather was about to die, she started
\nwriting a letter that later became the manuscript of the book. The House of the
\nSpirits<\/b> is a love-or-hate book because some readers didn\u00b4t like the graphical
\ndescriptions in the book and others found the magic realism aspects of the books
\n(like the ghosts) hard to believe.<\/span><\/p>\n

The story of the books unravels during almost a
\ncentury, telling the lives of Esteban and Clara, their daughter Blanca and
\nPedro Tercero Garc\u00eda and Alba and Miguel, both victims of the Chilean military
\ndictatorship (1973-1989). Throughout the novel the characters live in the
\nmiddle of the social and political ambiance of that time, having as a
\nbackground the magical elements introduced by the author. A latent dichotomy
\nstarts to appear, having Trueba\u00b4s becoming a very rich man, but also the
\nworkers realizing that they are the main backbone in the working society and
\nnot mere slaves ruled by wealthy patrones like Trueba himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Magic realism is an artistic and literary genre
\nfrom the middle of the 20th<\/sup> century. It was first used by the German
\nart critic Franz Roth to describe a painting that showed an altered reality,
\nbut it was used later by Arturo Uslar, from Venezuela, to describe the work of
\nsome Latin American writers. It developed itself very strongly in the 60s and
\n70s in Latin America as a show of discrepancy
\nof that time: the technology culture and the superstitious and traditional
\nroots. It also had a lot to do with the politics at the time, as a criticism to
\nthe dictatorial situation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez wrote one of the most
\nrepresentative works in this style: A Hundred Years of Solitude<\/b> (Cien A\u00f1os de
\nSoledad<\/i>). M\u00e1rquez said once: \u201cMy most important problem was destroying the
\nlines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some other authors who wrote in the Magic
\nRealism style include Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Stephen
\nAlexis, Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, hit the bookstore and get yourself one of Allende\u00b4s books, either in Spanish or English, you won\u00b4t regret it.<\/span><\/p>\n

See you next time!<\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever heard of Isabel Allende? She\u00b4s my favorite author in Spanish. Isabel was born in the early 40\u00b4s and was the daughter of Francisca Barros and Tom\u00e1s Allende, who was Chilean ambassador to Peru. For political reasons, she lived in Bolivia and Lebanon until 1958, when she moved back to Chile to finish her secondary…<\/p>\n

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