Isabel Allende’s next work of fiction should be interesting. In the years just past, she appears to have been tapping a rapidly depleting well. After the incredibly rich tapestry of her debut, The House of the Spirits, and the Eva Luna chronicles, she hit a dry patch with books like The Infinite Plan. These were geographically dislocating times for Allende. Driven into exile from her native Chile after Pinochet’s military coup displaced her cousin Salvador Allende, she had established temporary residence in Venezuela. That’s where this former journalist — whose presentation of fact, incidentally, often verged on fiction, given her fervid imagination and penchant for exaggeration — became a writer. Physically marooned, she tended her bonds with loved ones and her cultural inheritance by recasting them in fiction. Spirits may not find space on that bookshelf of works by Latin American greats like Marquez, Llosa and Cortazar, but it was an enchantment alright. Soon, however, that enchantment became a formula and left Allende stranded in an all too bleak zone between magic and realism. All too briefly, the old spark was visible in the heartbreakingly moving memoir Paula, her sixth book and an exercise in self-healing upon her daughter’s death. Begun at a comatose Paula’s bedside, it was an extraordinary memoir. It was the true story behind Spirits, it was a writer’s attempt to understand the genesis of her craft, it was a rendezvous with her muse. It was wonderful, and it was the end of a long road. Allende then penned the immensely popular Aphrodite, exceptional as snack lit, a perfect gift for overworked pals, but a slight inclusion in her work as a leading woman writer. By this time she had moved home to California and her next two books — Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia — tracked characters in Chile and the sunshine state. The formula was set in rock by now; the bestseller lists responded favourably, but the old spirit was missing. As it was in her last novel, City of the Beasts, a purportedly fabulous story for children. For Allende fans, the message was as sad as it was ringing: she had lost touch with her terrain. My Invented Country is a 200-page-long goodbye to that terrain. This is a rambling remembrance of her Chile. It is haphazardly heaped smorgasbord. For her readers most of it is familiar, if somewhat novel in her uncharacteristically spare prose. We’ve met them before, in her fiction and non-fiction, the father who disappeared and the grandfather who introduced her to the magic of stories. We’ve travelled with her before, through her peripatetic childhood, Santiago excursions, Venezuelan exile and Californian homecoming. We’ve debated with her these issues before, a woman’s place in Latin America, Chile’s unique ethnic mix, the promise of Allende’s socialism, America’s unpardonable support to military dictators. We seem to learn nothing new. Yet, My Invented Country is a startling tract. It is bookended between two September 11s: the first in 1973 when Salvador Allende was deposed, and the second in 2001 when it rained airliners on the New York skyline. The first signified the start of her flight from Chile — and equally her transition to a part inherited and increasingly imagined Chile — and writerhood. “Were it not for that event,” she writes, “it’s clear that I would never have left Chile, that I wouldn’t be a writer. nor would I have lived with nostalgia for so long.” The second 9/11, digested from a Californian homestead, highlighted that the Chile she called home was by now a state of mind — she had lost the country 28 years ago. She now belonged to another land. A little facile, this American embrace, yes? Maybe. But as a study in the emigrant writer’s dilemma, it is illuminating. When does she acknowledge that memory is fading, that the land has changed, that she herself has changed and forged new allegiances? How does it impact her fiction? To that last question, we should get an answer soon, given Allende’s habit of churning out a book a year.
