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Eva Luna
Isabel Allende, 1988
Bantam Books
307 pp.

In Brief
My name is Eva, which means “life,” according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of these things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory...“

This is the voice that carries us through Eva Luna, the assured voice of a naturally inventive storyteller, a woman who relates to us the picaresque tale of her own life (born poor, orphaned early, she will eventually rise to a position of unique influence) and of the people - from all levels of society - that she meets along the way. They include the rich and eccentric, for whom she works as a servant...the Lebanese emigré who befriends her and takes her in... her unfortunate godmother, whose brain is addled by rum, and who believes in all the Catholic saints, some of African origin and a few of her own invention, a street urchin who grows into a petty criminal and, later, a leader in the guerrilla struggle, a celebrated transsexual entertainer who instructs her, with great tenderness and insight, in the ways of the adult world, a young refugee whose flight from postwar Europe will prove crucial to Eva's fate...

As Eva tells her story, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex South American nation - the rich, the poor, the simple, and the sophisticated - in a novel replete with character and incident, with drama and comedy and history, a novel that will delight and increase her devoted audience. (From the author's website.)

One year later, in 1989, Allende followed up Eva Luna with a collection of short stories, Stories by Eva Luna. Though not strictly a sequel, the collection incorporates a number of characters from the novel.

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About the Author

• Birth—August 02, 1942
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Education—private schools in Bolivia and Lebanon
• Awards—Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1998; Sara Lee
   Foundation Award, 1998; WILLA Literary Award, 2000
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California, USA


Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of eight novels, including, The House of the Spirits, Ines of My Soul, Zorro, Daughter of Fortune, Eva Luna, and Portrait in Sepia and. She has also written a collection of stories; three memoirs, including My Invented Country and Paula; and a trilogy of children's novels. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and have become bestsellers across four continents. In 2004 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Isabel Allende lives in California.

In Isabel Allende's books, human beings do not exist merely in the three-dimensional sense. They can exert themselves as memory, as destiny, as spirits without form, as fairy tales. Just as the more mystical elements of Allende's past have shaped her work, so has the hard-bitten reality. Working as a journalist in Chile, Allende was forced to flee the country with her family after her uncle, President Salvador Allende, was killed in a coup in 1973.

Out of letters to family back in Chile came the manuscript that was to become Allende’s first novel. Her arrival on the publishing scene in 1985 with The House of the Spirits was instantly recognized as a literary event. The New York Times called it "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America."

To read a book by Allende is to believe in (or be persuaded of) the power of transcendence, spiritual and otherwise. Her characters are often what she calls "marginal," those who strive to live on the fringes of society. It may be someone like Of Love and Shadows 's Hipolito Ranquileo, who makes his living as a circus clown; or Eva Luna, a poor orphan who is the center of two Allende books (Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna).

Allende's characters have in common an inner fortitude that proves stronger than their adversity, and a sense of lineage that propels them both forward and backward. When you meet a central character in an Allende novel, be prepared to meet a few generations of his or her family. This multigenerational thread drives The House of the Spirits, the tale of the South American Trueba family. Not only did the novel draw Allende critical accolades (with such breathless raves as "spectacular," "astonishing" and "mesmerizing" from major reviewers), it landed her firmly in the magic realist tradition of predecessor (and acknowledged influence) Gabriel García Márquez. Some of its characters also reappeared in the historical novels Portrait in Sepia and Daughter of Fortune.

"It's strange that my work has been classified as magic realism," Allende has said, "because I see my novels as just being realistic literature." Indeed, much of what might be considered "magic" to others is real to Allende, who based the character Clara del Valle in The House of the Spirits on her own reputedly clairvoyant grandmother. And she has drawn as well upon the political violence that visited her life: Of Love and Shadows (1987) centers on a political crime in Chile, and other Allende books allude to the ideological divisions that affected the author so critically.

But all of her other work was "rehearsal," says Allende, for what she considers her most difficult and personal book. Paula is written for Allende's daughter, who died in 1992 after several months in a coma. Like Allende's fiction, it tells Paula's story through that of Allende's own and of her relatives. Allende again departed from fiction in Aphrodite, a book that pays homage to the romantic powers of food (complete with recipes for two such as "Reconciliation Soup"). The book's lighthearted subject matter had to have been a necessity for Allende, who could not write for nearly three years after the draining experience of writing Paula.

Whichever side of reality she is on, Allende's voice is unfailingly romantic and life-affirming, creating mystery even as she uncloaks it. Like a character in Of Love and Shadows, Allende tells "stories of her own invention whose aim [is] to ease suffering and make time pass more quickly," and she succeeds.

Extras
Allende has said that the character of Gregory Reeves in The Infinite Plan is based on her husband, Willie Gordon.

Allende begins all of her books on January 8, which she considers lucky because it was the day she began writing a letter to her dying grandfather that later became The House of the Spirits.

She began her career as a journalist, editing the magazine Paula and later contributing to the Venezuelan paper El Nacional. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

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Critics Say. . .
A remarkable novel, one in which a cascade of stories tumbles our before the reader, stories vivid and passionate and human... A beautiful translation catches the memorable voice of a smart, tough, and independent woman... Reading this novel is like asking your favorite storyteller to tell you a story and getting a hundred stories!
Alan Ryan - Washington Post



Eva Luna is the fiesty narrator of Isabel Allende's sumptuous, picaresque third novel - a tale that spans 40 years and moves from a surreal jungle to a modern-day urban capital where even the most apolitical are driven to risky antigovernment activities.
Elizabeth Benedict - Chicago Tribune



A woman makes love to an Indian dying of snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva``so she will love life.'' Thus begins Allende's latest novel, a magnificent successor to The House of the Spirits and Of Love & Shadows. Set in a Latin American country, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures. Brought up in the house of an eccentric doctor devoted to mummifying corpses, where her mother is a servant, Eva is left an orphan at six. Her black godmother, or madrina , leases her as a servant to a series of bizarre households of metaphorical significance, the last of which she leaves in grand style upon emptying a government Minister's chamberpot over his head. Interleaved with Eva's story is her account of a certain Rolf Carle, with whom her life will become linkedshe tells of his youth in Nazi Austria and young manhood as a filmmaker in South America. Through a series of improbable and felicitous coincidences, Eva is taken under the wing of such exotic benefactors as a street urchin who becomes a guerrilla leader, a colorful whorehouse Madam, a kindly Turkish merchant and a stunningly beautiful transsexual. Like the author, Eva is a prodigious fabulist, weaving extraordinary tales that change reality at will, making it, as she says, easier to bear. Although the fabulist's art is seen as dangerously escapist, Allende's wonderful novel, crammed with the strange and fantastical, the sensuous and the erotic, also speaks powerfully in the cause of freedom.
Publishers Weekly



Born in the back room of the mansion where her mother toils, and herself in service from an early age, the enchanting and ever-enchanted Eva Luna escapes oppression through story telling. Rolf Carle flees Germany for South America, and ultimately works as a documentary film maker, to escape childhood memories of burying the concentration camp dead. The two are brought together by guerrilla Huberto NaranjoEva's lover and a subject for Rolf's camerain this dense, opulent novel that serves as a metaphor for redemption through creative effort. In her earlier works ( The House of the Spirits, LJ 4/15/85; Of Love and Shadows, LJ 5/1/87), Allende's rich language occasionally shaded into overripeness; but here the prose is more tightly controlled, the characterizations defter. Her best work yet. BOMC alternate.
Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal

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Book Club Discussion Questions

Introduction:
Stories are like dreams; they follow their own rules," Isabel Allende says as she stands at a podium, addressing the audience in the Chicago Hilton and Towers' ballroom, where the Chicago Foundation for Women is holding its annual brunch. "The writer and the dreamer have so much in common: They can't control the plot, they are always part of the story or the dream.... It is this inability to control one's own destiny that has determined so much of the 57-year-old Peruvian-born writer's life and so much of her fiction.
(Book Magazine - Interview with author, March/April 2000)

1. In an interview published in 1991 Allende defined Magic Realism as “a literary device or a way of seeing in which there is space for the invisible forces that move the world: dreams, legends, myths, passions, history.” Why do you suppose she includes history in this list? Where do you see evidence of Magic Realism in Eva Luna? Do you think this technique or “way of seeing” makes her writing more “literary” (that is, more likely to be regarded as “serious fiction”) than would otherwise be the case?

2. An avowed feminist, Isabel Allende often critiques male dominance in her fiction, but she generally balances favorable with unfavorable male characters. What kinds of behavior does she tend to criticize even in male characters she does not portray as out-and-out villains? What traits does she celebrate most in her male characters? Why do you think she ends up with Rolf as her lover instead of Huberto?

3. Do you think of Eva Luna as a credible character, or does she strike you as some sort of stereotypical female superhero, perhaps a heroine drawn from TV soap opera (very popular throughout Latin America) or melodrama? Or is this really a useful question to ask about her? What do you think Allende intends to achieve with this character?

4. Aside from Eva Luna, what would you say about the parts played by other female characters in this novel? Consider, for example, her mother Consuelo, her madrina or godmother, La Señora, and Zulema. What do you have to say about Mimí’s role in the novel, particularly with respect to gender?

5. If you happen to read Eva Luna as a commentary, of sorts, on life and politics in modern Latin America, what does Allende appear to be saying? To what extent does revolutionary activity, as she depicts it, appear likely to produce positive results? What do you make of her characterization of Colonel Tolomeo Rodriguez?

6. Throughout the novel we are reminded of Eva’s desire to be a writer. In fact, her mother’s most important gift to her appears to be her capacity to tell unusual stories, and Allende dedicates the book to her own mother “who gave me a love of stories.” Aside from the novel itself, which we are presumably expected to think of as Eva’s work, what evidence do you see of her commitment to writing? Both this novel and The Stories of Eva Luna are preceded with an epigraph from "A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights." What does this tell you about Eva Luna’s (or Isabel Allende’s) views about the importance of stories?

These questions were developed by and used with the permission of The Idaho Commission for Libraries.