The soft-focus publicity shots and the romantic novels don’t prepare you for the considerable presence of Latin America’s foremost magical realists, Isabel Allende.
She has the tidy and prosperous look of the Chilean bourgeoisie to which she used to belong, before fleeing into exile more than 30 years ago. (She is the neice of Salvador Allende, the Marxist president whose violent overthrow ushered in the long years of the Pinochet repression.)
She looks much younger than her 65 years. That might, in part, be the result of the facelift she admits to in her latest book but it is much more a result of the energy and restlessness she radiates.
Allende is all business. Our conversation shifts quickly to her feelings about the United States, her adopted home of the past two decades.
What comes out is a strident mix of ingrained Left-leaning politics and a foreigner’s distaste for the less palatable aspects of popular culture, though this is leavened by a strong appreciation of the political and social openness of her adopted home.
“I dislike the vulgarity, the ignorance, the arrogance about the ignorance. How dumb people are and how they are about being dumb,” she declares.
Other barbs are reserved for local social conventions that seem constricting. “I hate political correctness. For a writer, it’s very limiting. You can’t say what you want to say.”
Political leanings
What really gets her going, though, is politics. And the more strident she becomes about present US politics, the more her command of English threatens to slip. “I don’t like McCain. He’s a ... war person,” she says, groping for the right words.
Following the logic of her own rhetoric, Allende even says she has thought of quitting the country if another Republican government is elected, before hauling herself back in. As a former refugee who is now married to an American and has an extended family in America, she concedes that the time for moving is over.
This Isabel Allende sitting opposite me is an appealing firebrand but not the person I came to find. What I had hoped to discover was the woman whose latest book, The Sum of Our Days, I have just finished. An account of the 16 years since the devastating death of her daughter Paula, it reads almost like a magical realist’s dream of life in the San Francisco Bay area.
The place she describes is one ripe with pharmacological and spiritual adventures, where “miracles” seem to happen at every turn and an extended family that she calls her “clan” and her “tribe” hang together through improbable events.
In the book, it doesn’t seem surprising when Allende engineers the adoption of her stepdaughter’s child by a pair of Buddhist nuns. Nor does she seem to bat an eye when a once hyper-conservative Venezuelan daughter-in-law confides that she is about to leave Allende’s son and grandchildren.
Allende also plays a part in bringing Juliette, her receptionist, into the extended family as a would-be surrogate mother for another daughter-in-law.
This is a subject she warms to. “I am the matriarch,” she declares. She describes the extended family she has built around her in California as a throwback to her cultural roots, to the time when family members depended entirely on the clan for support. Blended with the social mores and political currents of modern California, it has produced a rich combination.
An interesting life
“This is an incredibly tolerant place,” she says. It is also a place for spiritual experimentation. “We have the time and the inclination just to search for alternative ways of spirituality. You can choose.”
Then Allende starts to give a glimpse of what really makes her tick, at least as an author. “My life is full of ups and downs, full of people and stories, you know?” she says. “I don’t want a happy life. I want an interesting life, something I can write about. I think I’m a natural storyteller. I see the world in terms of stories.”
The all-important thing, she says, is to keep “the tension, the rhythm, the colours of the story. When my husband and I and our family are together and I hear them tell me a story, an anecdote of the family, I cringe because they’re missing the point. I mean, they just ruin the story. It’s a joke badly told.”
In her own memoir, the story, the particular joke, is always finely turned. “Other people say, it didn’t really happen that way,” she says.
“It wasn’t exactly in that place. And I say: ‘Who cares? Who cares where it was? What is important is the symbolism or the beauty or whatever.’ But people don’t get it.”
So does that mean the magical stories of her Californian clan should be taken with a pinch of salt? “You choose what to tell, what to omit, what to enhance,” she says.
