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Clarisa
Part of the Cuentos de Eva Luna, this story reveals Clarisa, an old lady who moved the hearts of those who knew her, including the richest of the community and the burglar who tried to steal from her.
Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1989
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About the author
Isabel Allende
271 books44.9k followersIsabel Allende Llona is a Chilean-American novelist. Allende, who writes in the "magic realism" tradition, is considered one of the first successful women novelists in Latin America. She has written novels based in part on her own experiences, often focusing on the experiences of women, weaving myth and realism together. She has lectured and done extensive book tours and has taught literature at several US colleges. She currently resides in California with her husband. Allende adopted U.S. citizenship in 2003.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 19, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Short Stories/Anthology
There is something eerie in the way Clarisa begins, like a Borges story that opens with a modest premise that turns monumental in its gravity. The world Allende paints is sepia-toned, electrical wires not yet strung, ancient chairs, the smell of candles — a world where time seems partially paused. Clarisa is born before electric light but lives to see television’s first images of the moon and to witness the Pope’s visit, a spectacle of holiness tangled with modern display.
What draws me directly, as with Calvino’s invisible cities or Barthelme’s absurd sketches, is how Allende uses minor miracles and tiny eccentricities to map the interior architecture of a human soul. Clarisa is almost pure spirit, detained in the sepia air of a portrait, and yet insistently material: her cracked old house, her children with odd afflictions, her poverty, the quivering body worn with age. She is both saint and beggar, myth and domestic reality.
In Borges, you often get mirror-selves, doubles, the doubtful saint, the demon who repents. Clarisa lives in that borderland. She is treated like a saint by her community: not canonized by the Church, but venerated in home altars, invoked in minor miracles. Her acts are small — easing hangovers, consoling loneliness, offering moral solace. These are not grand miracles; they are necessary ones. They exist in the liminal spaces between religious faith and everyday ethics. Her saintliness is postmodern in that it is not pure; it is riddled with irony and paradox.
Clarisa is poor, she has suffered, she is eccentric, she cannot move as freely, her body betrays her. And yet she gives. She redefines charity not as a hierarchical but as a mutual, messy relationship. At times, she helps the apparently helpless; at times, she derides them. She lives among moral contradictions. This recalls Barthelme’s characters who perform absurd kindnesses, or Calvino’s moral fables in which kindness is tested by survival, by time, by small betrayals. Allende treats her saint as a character in a fable, but also as a fully embodied human.
If Borges built libraries, Allende builds households as archives of memory. Clarisa’s house is a repository of lineage, love, and suffering. The judge husband, who lives isolated in a back room, becomes a temporal marker — a ghost whose presence fractures the narrative space. The children are not only Clarisa’s flesh and blood but also her legacy and burden. Time piles up. The walls sweat. Chairs sag. Furniture becomes “no longer antique” because decay has overtaken beauty. Allende sets up time as layered: Clarisa remembers past decades, but is alive in absurd modernization, the television images, the astronaut, and the Pope.
The narrative drifts in memory and perception: what Clarisa sees as spectacle, as wonder, often feels strange, homosexuality in nuns’ habits, protestors dressed in religious imagery, and her skewed perception of modern phenomena. She trusts her memory more than mediated images. This distrust of media, of spectacle, feels quite postmodern. It echoes Calvino’s skepticism of maps: the map is not the territory. The television may show the astronaut, but Clarisa doubts it: “It’s all a hoax, filmed in a Hollywood studio.”
One of Allende’s strongest moves in *Clarisa* is the collision between sacred tradition and modern spectacle, and the grotesque carnival that emerges when these collide. The Pope’s visit is ordinarily a sacred event. However, when he arrives, mock-nuns dressed as nuns enter, proclaiming abortion, divorce, the priesthood for women, sodomy, etc. It’s theatrical, subversive, mocking — or maybe prophetic. Clarisa, old and frail, falls to her knees in reverence but is also unsettled.
It is the carnival mirror of religion: theatricality, parody, belief. She cannot neatly contain her awe or her puzzlement. This recalls Borges’s fantasies where the line between the sacred and the profane dissolves. Clarisa’s life is full of bleeding thresholds: between what is holy and what is profane, what is myth and what is rumour, what is memory and what is spectacle. The postmodern condition is not the loss of faith, but faith distorted by modernity, by media, by crowded crowds.
Clarisa’s identity is manifold. She is a daughter, mother, widow, improbable saint, eccentric figure, moral anchor, sometimes a fool. Her legacy is both real — children, deeds, anecdotes — and intangible, her reputation among the poor, the rumour of miracles. She outlives some of her capacity; her body weakens, yet her spirit seems to germinate wings as if death is not an erasure but a threshold. Like Calvino’s invisible cities, identity in *Clarisa* is shaped by what others see of you, what they remember, what myths they build. Don Diego Cienfuegos appears near the end, a politician, a prócer, who comes to visit her.
Their encounter is tender; she blushes, and he is weak but full of respect. In that moment, Clarisa’s identity as moral gravity is affirmed. The saint-status, the popular reverence, the rumour of miracles — all this is part of how identity persists. Postmodern identity is never stable. Clarisa is shaped by her time: born in old-world conditions, living through modernization, the spectacle of religion, political theater, and the moral disorder of modern life. Yet she resists being simply a relic; she participates. She gives, she interacts, she judges, she suffers.
The story is told by a narrator who once served as Clarissa’s maid, and the voice is intimate, partial, sometimes critical, always compassionate. This narrator recalls childhood or adolescence, then later returns to Clarisa, then later to Clarisa’s death. That perspective allows us to see Clarisa both from within and without — myth-maker and woman, saint and flesh. The narrator is sometimes uncertain: about age, about Clarisa’s miracles, about what Clarisa believed, about what others believed. That uncertainty is key. It makes the text postmodern: there is no omnipotent know-all. Memory falters; stories are told with gaps. Some events are reported second-hand; others are experienced. This recalls Barthelme’s partial narrators, or Borges’s stories in which narrators confess their own uncertainty. It’s also reminiscent of Calvino’s *Invisible Cities*, where the narrator describes things, but what is described is as much inside the narrator as outside.
Clarisa always behaves with moral seriousness, yet Allende does not spare irony. Clarisa gives all she has, but often to people who don’t care, or who fail to appreciate, or who fail to transcend their own smallness. She helps the street hustlers, beggars, strangers: sometimes they receive, sometimes they reject her kindness. Once, a robber enters her house; instead of anger, she offers what she has, yields her wallet, and invites him for tea. That gesture is Christian, absurd, heroic. But it is also a paradox: she is robbed, vulnerable. She risks humiliation. Yet the text never allows that moment to settle into idealism — it’s messy, human. Clarisa’s death is not heroic in a conventional way; it is quiet, full of people gathering, full of popular expectation of miracles, but also full of decay, smells, disease, the frailty of the body. Her last visit by Don Diego is not spectacular; she is weak, he is feeble, but there is dignity. In a postmodern twist, the miraculous is not separated from mortality; it is woven into it.
So how does *Clarisa* echo Borges, Barthelme, Calvino? From Borges comes the use of myth, of saints who are not officially recognized, of stories that border on biography and legend. Also, the way time folds, the way small facts are treated as portent. From Barthelme, moral absurdity, gentle satire, the kindnesses that confound expectation, narrators who love their subjects but do not idealize them completely, the drift of poverty, bodily decay, and generosity as both burden and gift. From Calvino, the sense of place as metaphor, the invisible city of Clarisa’s old house, the way identity is mapped through memories, rooms, the slow accumulation of objects, and the way spectacle interfaces with tradition. If Allende’s style in *Clarisa* sometimes leans toward magical realism, it is unlike García Márquez’s flamboyant supernatural. Hers is restrained. The miraculous occurs via attitudes, the rumour of miracles, saint-like status, small transformations rather than enormous ruptures. This restraint gives the story a postmodern poise: we are never asked to suspend disbelief entirely; rather, we are asked to hold the miraculous and the mundane in uneasy tension.
At its heart, *Clarisa* is a meditation on mortality, compassion, legacy, and the possibility of saintliness in an imperfect world. It asks what it means to live long enough to become a myth. Can goodness, given in small gestures, accumulate into meaning? What is the cost of holiness — physical, relational, temporal? What does one leave behind, beyond children and stone altars and rumor? It also interrogates modernity: the television astronaut, the spectacle of religion, the mock-nuns protesting. Clarisa is skeptical, even a little suspicious. She trusts her senses, her memory. She is not naïve. She is old, time-scarred, and maybe because of that, deeply lucid.
Allende’s prose is warm, evocative without overindulgence; her characterization of Clarisa is layered, sympathetic, never mawkish. The story moves with the unhurried gravity of folks who have lived. The moral complexity is strong. The voice gives both distance and intimacy. The use of contrast — poverty versus dignity, spectacle versus silence — makes the emotional resonance deeper. The themes feel broad yet intimate. Because of its reverence, some readers may feel the story leans toward idealization or nostalgia. The miraculous and saintly frame might obscure some of the darker social critiques by wrapping them in a religious or mythic glow. Also, the narrative pace is slow; some moments of symbolism, such as the albino child, the piano, and the judge in the back room, are powerful but maybe underexplored in terms of psychological interiority. Some might want more tension, more conflicted voices.
In *Clarisa*, we get a fable: a secular saint, a myth in living flesh. Nevertheless, it’s not simple. The postmodern as aesthetic sensibility here lies not so much in ironic self-reference or playful metafiction but in the way Allende holds contradictions: holiness and decay; faith and spectacle; time moving forward and memory leaking backward.
Clarisa does not become a legend after she dies; she already lives as a legend among her people. Reading *Clarisa* feels like stepping into a portrait where the painted subject turns her head, yet knows she is being looked at. It feels like the story isn’t just about Clarisa but about all the stories we tell about goodness, about miracles, about how we narrate lives so that they endure. It asks us: when we die, what will people tell of us? What small kindnesses will become myth? What deformities or sufferings will be smoothed over or remembered? And in that interrogation, Allende doesn’t give easy answers. She gives instead a life: humble, strange, stubborn in its grace. *Clarisa* is more than Isabel Allende’s gentle miracle; she argues that myth lives in the house of the ordinary.
And maybe, in that argument, she quietly takes her place among the storytellers who treat fable as truth, who believe that the real world is full of wonder, decay, redemption, and paradox.
She shows that postmodern tales are not always about alienation, fragmentation, or pure irony. Sometimes they are about compassion, fully alive, refusing to be consoling but also refusing to be bleak. Clarisa becomes a house, a memory, a small shrine — and Allende writes it so we carry it with us.
There is something eerie in the way Clarisa begins, like a Borges story that opens with a modest premise that turns monumental in its gravity. The world Allende paints is sepia-toned, electrical wires not yet strung, ancient chairs, the smell of candles — a world where time seems partially paused. Clarisa is born before electric light but lives to see television’s first images of the moon and to witness the Pope’s visit, a spectacle of holiness tangled with modern display.
What draws me directly, as with Calvino’s invisible cities or Barthelme’s absurd sketches, is how Allende uses minor miracles and tiny eccentricities to map the interior architecture of a human soul. Clarisa is almost pure spirit, detained in the sepia air of a portrait, and yet insistently material: her cracked old house, her children with odd afflictions, her poverty, the quivering body worn with age. She is both saint and beggar, myth and domestic reality.
In Borges, you often get mirror-selves, doubles, the doubtful saint, the demon who repents. Clarisa lives in that borderland. She is treated like a saint by her community: not canonized by the Church, but venerated in home altars, invoked in minor miracles. Her acts are small — easing hangovers, consoling loneliness, offering moral solace. These are not grand miracles; they are necessary ones. They exist in the liminal spaces between religious faith and everyday ethics. Her saintliness is postmodern in that it is not pure; it is riddled with irony and paradox.
Clarisa is poor, she has suffered, she is eccentric, she cannot move as freely, her body betrays her. And yet she gives. She redefines charity not as a hierarchical but as a mutual, messy relationship. At times, she helps the apparently helpless; at times, she derides them. She lives among moral contradictions. This recalls Barthelme’s characters who perform absurd kindnesses, or Calvino’s moral fables in which kindness is tested by survival, by time, by small betrayals. Allende treats her saint as a character in a fable, but also as a fully embodied human.
If Borges built libraries, Allende builds households as archives of memory. Clarisa’s house is a repository of lineage, love, and suffering. The judge husband, who lives isolated in a back room, becomes a temporal marker — a ghost whose presence fractures the narrative space. The children are not only Clarisa’s flesh and blood but also her legacy and burden. Time piles up. The walls sweat. Chairs sag. Furniture becomes “no longer antique” because decay has overtaken beauty. Allende sets up time as layered: Clarisa remembers past decades, but is alive in absurd modernization, the television images, the astronaut, and the Pope.
The narrative drifts in memory and perception: what Clarisa sees as spectacle, as wonder, often feels strange, homosexuality in nuns’ habits, protestors dressed in religious imagery, and her skewed perception of modern phenomena. She trusts her memory more than mediated images. This distrust of media, of spectacle, feels quite postmodern. It echoes Calvino’s skepticism of maps: the map is not the territory. The television may show the astronaut, but Clarisa doubts it: “It’s all a hoax, filmed in a Hollywood studio.”
One of Allende’s strongest moves in *Clarisa* is the collision between sacred tradition and modern spectacle, and the grotesque carnival that emerges when these collide. The Pope’s visit is ordinarily a sacred event. However, when he arrives, mock-nuns dressed as nuns enter, proclaiming abortion, divorce, the priesthood for women, sodomy, etc. It’s theatrical, subversive, mocking — or maybe prophetic. Clarisa, old and frail, falls to her knees in reverence but is also unsettled.
It is the carnival mirror of religion: theatricality, parody, belief. She cannot neatly contain her awe or her puzzlement. This recalls Borges’s fantasies where the line between the sacred and the profane dissolves. Clarisa’s life is full of bleeding thresholds: between what is holy and what is profane, what is myth and what is rumour, what is memory and what is spectacle. The postmodern condition is not the loss of faith, but faith distorted by modernity, by media, by crowded crowds.
Clarisa’s identity is manifold. She is a daughter, mother, widow, improbable saint, eccentric figure, moral anchor, sometimes a fool. Her legacy is both real — children, deeds, anecdotes — and intangible, her reputation among the poor, the rumour of miracles. She outlives some of her capacity; her body weakens, yet her spirit seems to germinate wings as if death is not an erasure but a threshold. Like Calvino’s invisible cities, identity in *Clarisa* is shaped by what others see of you, what they remember, what myths they build. Don Diego Cienfuegos appears near the end, a politician, a prócer, who comes to visit her.
Their encounter is tender; she blushes, and he is weak but full of respect. In that moment, Clarisa’s identity as moral gravity is affirmed. The saint-status, the popular reverence, the rumour of miracles — all this is part of how identity persists. Postmodern identity is never stable. Clarisa is shaped by her time: born in old-world conditions, living through modernization, the spectacle of religion, political theater, and the moral disorder of modern life. Yet she resists being simply a relic; she participates. She gives, she interacts, she judges, she suffers.
The story is told by a narrator who once served as Clarissa’s maid, and the voice is intimate, partial, sometimes critical, always compassionate. This narrator recalls childhood or adolescence, then later returns to Clarisa, then later to Clarisa’s death. That perspective allows us to see Clarisa both from within and without — myth-maker and woman, saint and flesh. The narrator is sometimes uncertain: about age, about Clarisa’s miracles, about what Clarisa believed, about what others believed. That uncertainty is key. It makes the text postmodern: there is no omnipotent know-all. Memory falters; stories are told with gaps. Some events are reported second-hand; others are experienced. This recalls Barthelme’s partial narrators, or Borges’s stories in which narrators confess their own uncertainty. It’s also reminiscent of Calvino’s *Invisible Cities*, where the narrator describes things, but what is described is as much inside the narrator as outside.
Clarisa always behaves with moral seriousness, yet Allende does not spare irony. Clarisa gives all she has, but often to people who don’t care, or who fail to appreciate, or who fail to transcend their own smallness. She helps the street hustlers, beggars, strangers: sometimes they receive, sometimes they reject her kindness. Once, a robber enters her house; instead of anger, she offers what she has, yields her wallet, and invites him for tea. That gesture is Christian, absurd, heroic. But it is also a paradox: she is robbed, vulnerable. She risks humiliation. Yet the text never allows that moment to settle into idealism — it’s messy, human. Clarisa’s death is not heroic in a conventional way; it is quiet, full of people gathering, full of popular expectation of miracles, but also full of decay, smells, disease, the frailty of the body. Her last visit by Don Diego is not spectacular; she is weak, he is feeble, but there is dignity. In a postmodern twist, the miraculous is not separated from mortality; it is woven into it.
So how does *Clarisa* echo Borges, Barthelme, Calvino? From Borges comes the use of myth, of saints who are not officially recognized, of stories that border on biography and legend. Also, the way time folds, the way small facts are treated as portent. From Barthelme, moral absurdity, gentle satire, the kindnesses that confound expectation, narrators who love their subjects but do not idealize them completely, the drift of poverty, bodily decay, and generosity as both burden and gift. From Calvino, the sense of place as metaphor, the invisible city of Clarisa’s old house, the way identity is mapped through memories, rooms, the slow accumulation of objects, and the way spectacle interfaces with tradition. If Allende’s style in *Clarisa* sometimes leans toward magical realism, it is unlike García Márquez’s flamboyant supernatural. Hers is restrained. The miraculous occurs via attitudes, the rumour of miracles, saint-like status, small transformations rather than enormous ruptures. This restraint gives the story a postmodern poise: we are never asked to suspend disbelief entirely; rather, we are asked to hold the miraculous and the mundane in uneasy tension.
At its heart, *Clarisa* is a meditation on mortality, compassion, legacy, and the possibility of saintliness in an imperfect world. It asks what it means to live long enough to become a myth. Can goodness, given in small gestures, accumulate into meaning? What is the cost of holiness — physical, relational, temporal? What does one leave behind, beyond children and stone altars and rumor? It also interrogates modernity: the television astronaut, the spectacle of religion, the mock-nuns protesting. Clarisa is skeptical, even a little suspicious. She trusts her senses, her memory. She is not naïve. She is old, time-scarred, and maybe because of that, deeply lucid.
Allende’s prose is warm, evocative without overindulgence; her characterization of Clarisa is layered, sympathetic, never mawkish. The story moves with the unhurried gravity of folks who have lived. The moral complexity is strong. The voice gives both distance and intimacy. The use of contrast — poverty versus dignity, spectacle versus silence — makes the emotional resonance deeper. The themes feel broad yet intimate. Because of its reverence, some readers may feel the story leans toward idealization or nostalgia. The miraculous and saintly frame might obscure some of the darker social critiques by wrapping them in a religious or mythic glow. Also, the narrative pace is slow; some moments of symbolism, such as the albino child, the piano, and the judge in the back room, are powerful but maybe underexplored in terms of psychological interiority. Some might want more tension, more conflicted voices.
In *Clarisa*, we get a fable: a secular saint, a myth in living flesh. Nevertheless, it’s not simple. The postmodern as aesthetic sensibility here lies not so much in ironic self-reference or playful metafiction but in the way Allende holds contradictions: holiness and decay; faith and spectacle; time moving forward and memory leaking backward.
Clarisa does not become a legend after she dies; she already lives as a legend among her people. Reading *Clarisa* feels like stepping into a portrait where the painted subject turns her head, yet knows she is being looked at. It feels like the story isn’t just about Clarisa but about all the stories we tell about goodness, about miracles, about how we narrate lives so that they endure. It asks us: when we die, what will people tell of us? What small kindnesses will become myth? What deformities or sufferings will be smoothed over or remembered? And in that interrogation, Allende doesn’t give easy answers. She gives instead a life: humble, strange, stubborn in its grace. *Clarisa* is more than Isabel Allende’s gentle miracle; she argues that myth lives in the house of the ordinary.
And maybe, in that argument, she quietly takes her place among the storytellers who treat fable as truth, who believe that the real world is full of wonder, decay, redemption, and paradox.
She shows that postmodern tales are not always about alienation, fragmentation, or pure irony. Sometimes they are about compassion, fully alive, refusing to be consoling but also refusing to be bleak. Clarisa becomes a house, a memory, a small shrine — and Allende writes it so we carry it with us.
October 8, 2020
Una pequeña historia con la que en pocos minutos Isabel Allende nos muestra su magia, el desarrollo de personajes reales, cercanos y fuertes.
Una historia que nos enseña a que en la vida lo importante para superar los obstáculos es la actitud y la voluntad.
Me ha gustado e impresionado, sobre todo el final que no lo esperas.
Una historia que nos enseña a que en la vida lo importante para superar los obstáculos es la actitud y la voluntad.
Me ha gustado e impresionado, sobre todo el final que no lo esperas.
August 7, 2023
Lectura obligada del cole 🙇♂️
October 29, 2025
Mi primer contacto con la autora recomendado por mi profesora de la facultad.
Me gustó. Lectura rápida.
October 4, 2025
Allende rules.
This was great, but not going to review it.
For the moment at least.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1989] [15p] [Fiction] [3.5] [Recommendable]
-----------------------------------------------
★★★★☆ The Stories of Eva Luna <--
★★★☆☆ El juego de Ripper
-----------------------------------------------
Allende sabe.
Esto fue excelente, pero no voy a reseñarlo.
Al menos por ahora.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1989] [15p] [Ficción] [3.5] [Recomendable]
-----------------------------------------------
This was great, but not going to review it.
For the moment at least.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1989] [15p] [Fiction] [3.5] [Recommendable]
-----------------------------------------------
★★★★☆ The Stories of Eva Luna <--
★★★☆☆ El juego de Ripper
-----------------------------------------------
Allende sabe.
Esto fue excelente, pero no voy a reseñarlo.
Al menos por ahora.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1989] [15p] [Ficción] [3.5] [Recomendable]
-----------------------------------------------
March 17, 2019
Calificación: 3.75
Sumamente corta y fácil de leer. Me la tuve que leer para el colegio, pero fue muy divertido. El hecho de que te narren a esta señora (Clarisa) como una santa hace que nunca te imagines las cosas que puede ocultar sólo para que su vida se vea perfecta (hasta en esa época habían complejos por tener una vida perfecta según estándares).
Sumamente corta y fácil de leer. Me la tuve que leer para el colegio, pero fue muy divertido. El hecho de que te narren a esta señora (Clarisa) como una santa hace que nunca te imagines las cosas que puede ocultar sólo para que su vida se vea perfecta (hasta en esa época habían complejos por tener una vida perfecta según estándares).
January 17, 2019
Trata sobre una mujer anciana llamada Clarissa y de su fama por ser una mujer santa en su pueblo, pero a la vez, trata de todos los secretos que esta guarda...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews