What Book to Read?

This memoir, published in 2003, is about two ‘invented countries’: Chile, and the landscape of memory that Allende draws on for writing her fiction. These two invented countries are inextricably intermingled. Allende left Chile after the military coup that brought the dictator General Pinochet to power, and most of her memories are of Chile before the growth of the unrestrained free market capitalism that Pinochet introduced. These memories are necessarily partial and, she says, nostalgic. But along with later experiences, they served as the raw material for a good deal of her fiction. ‘I can’t separate the subject of Chile from my own life,’ she says.

Allende has spent much of her life living outside Chile. Her father was a diplomat, and she was born in Peru. Her ‘stepfather’ – her mother never married her second lover because he couldn’t get a divorce – was also a diplomat, and the family travelled with him to Bolivia and Lebanon. She then returned to live with her grandparents in Chile, but after the coup, fled to Venezuela. Her second marriage was to an American and she now lives in California. ‘It was my destiny to become a vagabond,’ she says, and ‘lacking a land to put down roots in’, she had to anchor herself through her writing.

Allende was born into an upper middle class family, and she is acutely aware of the various social distinctions that operated in Chile at the time. These were based as much on origin – European heritage being valued over local Indian birth – and family connections as on wealth. She paints Chileans as strongly family orientated, somewhat reserved, very religious and socially conservative – though one has to assume that this is a very partial view – which of course she never disputes – as such an electorate would hardly have voted for the socialist President Salvatore Allende. Allende herself was aware of the inequality and hypocrisy of her society, and says she always felt an outsider to it. But initially, she conformed to social expectations, not even thinking of going to university, marrying young and immediately starting a family. She fell into a career as a journalist more or less by accident.

Allende’s radicalisation seems to have come as much from her sense of the injustice of women’s unequal place in Chilean society as from a belief in class warfare. She was, she says, a feminist before she knew the word for it. She felt she was a prisoner in a rigid system of male machismo, the power of the Catholic Church and social convention. Soon she was using her position as a journalist and TV presenter to promote a feminist agenda – a radical stance in socially rigid Chile. Although she doesn’t talk much about her part in Chilean political life in this memoir (having done so in an earlier one), she was clearly on the left, despite the political conservatism of most of her family. The exception was, of course, her ‘uncle’ – actually her father’s cousin – Salvatore Allende. After his overthrow and suicide or murder in 1973, Isabel did not at once flee, but feeling increasingly threatened by the regime, with its secret police and use of torture, she felt by 1975 that she had no choice but to leave. ‘I remember fear as a permanent metallic taste in my mouth,’ she writes. She lived in Caracas for ten years as a refugee, and I couldn’t help but be struck by her comment that ‘Instead of making an effort to learn about the land that had so generously taken me in, and learn to love it, I was obsessed with going home to Chile … you feel like a victim who has lost half her life’. I wonder if that is true for the refugees now seeking desperately to come to Australia.

For all its interest, I found this rather a frustrating book. It has very little structure, with Allende returning again and again to the themes of memory and nostalgia, rather than presenting a chronological account. Allende is aware of this, noting at one point that she needs to pick up the main thread, ‘if there is any thread in all this meandering.’ She justifies this meandering by saying that ‘Memories don’t organise themselves chronologically, they’re like smoke, changing, ephemeral’. No doubt this is true, but it isn’t always easy to follow as a narrative. Sometimes I find her observations a bit trite, as in ‘[Chileans’] spiritual compulsion rises from the earth itself: a people who live amid mountains logically turn their eyes towards the heavens.’ Really? But she can also be very funny, as in ‘Elvis Presley was already fat by the time I learned of his existence’. Maybe the translation from Spanish also gives a slightly flat and naive tone to what in the original might have been sharper. Or maybe I’m being unreasonable here; Allende has had many tragedies in her life, and overcoming them as she has is an incredible achievement that can fairly be told with a little complaisance.

You can read more about Isabel Allende here. Her website lists her books, and also gives information about the Isabel Allende Foundation, set up after the death of her daughter from the neurological disease porphyria, to support projects promoting social and economic justice for women.

Listen to this speech Allende made in 2007 on feminism, featured on the TED website to celebrate International Women’s Day (March 8).