Eva Luna
Isabel Allende, 1988
Random House
307 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553280586
Summary
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 emigre 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 2, 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
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition. Author of more than 20 books—essay collections, memoirs, and novels, she is perhaps best known for her novels The House of the Spirits (1982), Daughter of Fortune (1999), and Ines of My Soul (2006). She has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." All told her novels have been translated from Spanish into over 30 languages and have sold more than 55 million copies.
Her novels are often based upon her personal experience and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to teach literature. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted American citizenship in 2003, having lived in California with her American husband since 1989.
Early background
Allende was born Isabel Allende Llona in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros and Tomas Allende, who was at the time the Chilean ambassador to Peru. Her father was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973, making Salvador her first cousin once removed (not her uncle as he is sometimes referred to).
In 1945, after her father had disappeared, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago, Chile, where they lived until 1953. Allende's mother married diplomat Ramon Huidobro, and from 1953-1958 the family moved often, including to Bolivia and Beirut. In Bolivia, Allende attended a North American private school; in Beirut, she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile in 1958, where Allende was briefly home-schooled. In her youth, she read widely, particularly the works of William Shakespeare.
From 1959 to 1965, while living in Chile, Allende finished her secondary studies. She married Miguel Frias in 1962; the couple's daughter Paula was born in 1963 and their son Nicholas in 1966. During that time Allende worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Santiago, Chile, then in Brussels, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe.
Returning to Chile in 1996, Allende translated romance novels (including those of Barbara Cartland) from English to Spanish but was fired for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue in order to make the heriones sound more intelligent. She also altered the Cinderella endings, letting the heroines find more independence.
In 1967 Allende joined the editorial staff for Paula magazine and in 1969 the children's magazine Mampato, where she later became editor. She published two children's stories, Grandmother Panchita and Lauchas y Lauchones, as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita.
She also worked in Chilean television from 1970-1974. As a journalist, she interviewed famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda told Allende that she had too much imagination to be a journalist and that she should become a novelist. He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form—which she did and which became her first published book. In 1973, Allende's play El Embajador played in Santiago, a few months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.
The military coup in September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power and changed everything for Allende. Her mother and diplotmat stepfather narrowly escaped assassination, and she herself began receiving death threats. In 1973 Allende fled to Venezuela.
Life after Chile
Allende remained in exile in Venezuela for 13 years, working as a columnist for El Nacional, a major newspaper. On a 1988 visit to California, she met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon, with whom she now lives in San Rafael, California. Her son Nicolas and his children live nearby.
In 1992 Allende's daughter Paula died at the age of 28, the result of an error in medication while hospitalized for porphyria (a rarely fatal metabolic disease). To honor her daughter, Allenda started the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected."
In 1994, Allende was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit—the first woman to receive this honor.
She was granted U.S. citizenship in 2003 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was one of the eight flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
In 2008 Allende received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from San Francisco State University for her "distinguished contributions as a literary artist and humanitarian." In 2010 she received Chile's National Literature Prize.
Writing
In 1981, during her exile, Allende received a phone call that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death. She sat down to write him a letter wishing to "keep him alive, at least in spirit." Her letter evolved into The House of the Spirits—the intent of which was to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although rejected by numerous Latin American publishers, the novel was finally published in Spain, running more than two dozen editions in Spanish and a score of translations. It was an immense success.
Allende has since become known for her vivid storytelling. As a writer, she holds to a methodical literary routine, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. "I always start on 8 January,"Allende once said, a tradition that began with the letter to her dying grandfather.
Her 1995 book Paula recalls Allende's own childhood in Santiago, Chile, and the following years she spent in exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter. The memoir is as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as it is the chronicle of Paula's death.
Her 2008 memoir The Sum of Our Days centers on her recent life with her immediate family—her son, second husband, and grandchildren. The Island Beneath the Sea, set in New Orleans, was published in 2010. Maya's Notebook, a novel alternating between Berkeley, California, and Chiloe, an island in Chile, was published in 2011 (2013 in the U.S.). Three movies have been based on her novels—Aphrodite, Eva Luna, and Gift for a Sweetheart. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/23/2013.)
Book Reviews
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 Naranjo, Eva'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, Of Love and Shadows), Allende's rich language occasionally shaded into overripeness; but here the prose is more tightly controlled, the characterizations defter. Her best work yet. —Barbara Hoffert.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. 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.)
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