Reader's Corner discussion

Isabel Allende (born 2 August 1942) is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) and City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias, 2002), which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author". In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize.
Allende's 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.

BIOGRAPHY

Allende was born Isabel Allende Llona in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros and Tomás 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; so Salvador is her first cousin once removed. Many sources cite Allende as being Salvador Allende's niece (without specifying that the relationship is that Tomas and Salvador are cousins); the confusion stems from Allende herself often referring to Salvador as her "'uncle" (tío) in her private life and public interviews. This is because in Spanish a "first cousin once removed" is translated as "second degree uncle" (tío en segundo grado).


Isabel Allende at the Miami Book Fair International in 1990
In 1945, after Tomás had disappeared, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago, Chile, where they lived until 1953. Between 1953 and 1958, Allende's mother married Ramón Huidobro and moved often. Huidobro was a diplomat appointed to Bolivia and Beirut. In Bolivia, Allende attended a North American private school; and in Beirut, Lebanon she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile in 1958. Allende was also briefly home-schooled. In her youth, she read widely, particularly the works of William Shakespeare.
In 1970, Salvador Allende appointed Huidobro as ambassador to Argentina.
While living in Chile, Allende finished her secondary studies and met engineering student Miguel Frías whom she married in 1962. Reportedly, "Allende married early, into an Anglophile family and a kind of double life: at home she was the obedient wife and mother of two; in public she became, after a spell translating Barbara Cartland, a moderately well-known TV personality, a dramatist and a journalist on a feminist magazine."
From 1959 to 1965, Allende worked with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization in Santiago, Chile, then in Brussels, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe. For a brief while in Chile, she also had a job translating romance novels from English to Spanish. However, she was fired for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue of the heroines to make them sound more intelligent as well as altering the Cinderella endings to let the heroines find more independence and do good in the world.
Allende and Frías' daughter Paula was born in 1963. In 1966, Allende again returned to Chile and her son Nicolás was born there that year.
Reportedly, "the CIA-backed military coup in September 1973 (that brought Augusto Pinochet to power) changed everything" for Allende because "her name meant she was caught up in finding safe passage for those on the wanted lists" (helping until her mother and stepfather, a diplomat in Argentina, narrowly escaped assassination). When she herself was added to the list and began receiving death threats, she fled to Venezuela, where she stayed for 13 years. In Venezuela she was a columnist for El Nacional, a main newspaper. In 1978, she began a temporary separation from Miguel Frías. She lived in Spain for two months, then returned to her marriage.


Current life
During a visit to California in 1988, Allende met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon. In 1994, she was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit, the first woman to receive this honor. Allende currently lives in San Rafael, California. Most of her family lives near her, with her son living "with his second wife and her grandchildren just down the hill; her son and his family live in the house she and her second husband, San Francisco lawyer and novelist William Gordon, vacated."
In 2006, she was one of the eight flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. In 2008, Allende received the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters from San Francisco State University for her "distinguished contributions as a literary artist and humanitarian."

Literary Criticism

Despite her commercial success, Allende has been the subject of biting negative criticism from other authors and literary critics — among them Roberto Bolaño and Giannina Braschi who declared in her novel Yo-Yo Boing! that Isabel Allende is "killing García Márquez a little more each day the same way Michael Jackson's sisters are killing Michael Jackson." In an article published in Entre paréntesis, Bolaño writes that Allende's literature is anemic and compares it to a person on his deathbed. Bolaño has been one of her harshest critics, saying that it is to give her credit to call her a writer and that she is rather a "writing machine". Literary critic Harold Bloom concurs with Bolaño that Allende is a bad writer, and adds that she only reflects a determinate period and that afterwards everybody will have forgotten her. Of Bolaño, Allende said to El Clarín that she is honoured to be represented by him as a Chilean, although she remembered Bolaño regarded her as trash. In the same interview, Allende recognises that she has rarely had good criticism in Chile and that Chilean intellectuals "detest" her. Novelist Gonzalo Contreras says that "she commits a grave error, to confuse commercial success with literary quality". Allende disagrees with these assessments of her, and she has also been quoted as saying:

The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing. There was a review of my last book in one American paper by a professor of Latin American studies and he attacked me personally for the sole reason that I sold a lot of books. That is unforgivable.

Alternatively, it has been said[by whom?] that "Allende's impact not only on Latin American literature but also on world literature cannot be overestimated." The Los Angeles Times has called Allende "a genius," and she has received many international awards, including the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, granted to writers "who have contributed to the beauty of the world." She has recently been called a "literary legend" by Latino Leaders Magazine, which in its 2007 article named Allende as the third most influential Latino leader in the world.

Works:

The House of the Spirits (1982) La casa de los espíritus
The Porcelain Fat Lady (1984) La gorda de porcelana
Of Love and Shadows (1985) De amor y de sombra
Eva Luna (1987) Eva Luna
The Stories of Eva Luna (1989) Cuentos de Eva Luna
The Infinite Plan (1991) El plan infinito
Paula (1995) Paula
Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses (1998) Afrodita
Daughter of Fortune (1999) Hija de la fortuna
Portrait in Sepia (2000) Retrato en sepia
City of the Beasts (2002) La ciudad de las bestias
My Invented Country: A Memoir (2003) Mi país inventado
Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004) El reino del dragón de oro
Zorro (2005) El Zorro: Comienza la leyenda
Forest of the Pygmies (2005) El bosque de los pigmeos
Ines of My Soul (2006) Inés del alma mía
The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir (2008) La suma de los días
The Island Beneath the Sea (2010) La isla bajo el mar
Maya's Notebook (2011) El Cuaderno de Maya