Isabel Allende - The queen of Magical realism

I just finished reading Isabel Allende’s “The house of Spirits”. It had been in my bucket list for a long time. Curiously enough, I have read most of her work except this - the very first book that came out in 1982. Of the many voices of Women that emerged in the last thirty or forty years in literature: Margaret Atwood, A S Byatt, Iris Murdoch to name a few of the very best - Isabel Allende’s genre of storytelling is unique; and in many ways representative, symbolic of Latin American spirit of magical realism that bursts through every single page of her novels. Over the last three decades, all her stories have had a string feminine bias: Mighty willed, beautiful, capricious and makers of their own destiny - such are the heroines that Isabel’s fertile mind conjures up for us. I remember her speaking in one of the TED talk many years ago, where she remarked that most of her characters are derived from common people that she had encountered, but once she starts breathing her fiery spirit into them, they somehow transform themselves into somebody esoteric and grandiose and end up as personalities imbued with her own vision of Female power. Pick up any of her books: “The stories of Eva Luna”, “Portrait in sepia” or the beautiful “Island in the sea” - and you find passages of mesmeric delight; language so profound and yet so simple that it will leave one breathless in its flow. Her confidence and command over the medium shows in the way that she could condense the life and times of three generations in a matter of a few chapters, without compromising the integrity or pulse of the story that she has set out to tell. And above all - there is an ethereal quality to her narrative that hangs tenuously in the penumbral region of a magical world: where spirits can talk, tables can move, dogs can roar and premonitions turn into visible realities; and in between all these chimerical phenomena, the characters in her story play out the most intensely personal, social and political drama of their times. A fairy tale cannot be told better…

“The house of spirits”, then is the first spurt of creativity from this fiery writer, and in 1992, it was made into a movie starring the talented Meryl Streep. It was a difficult movie to make, but the presence of gifted actors made the film possible and watchable.

Before I end this short essay, I must make mention that Isabel’s writing’s soaks with sensitive eroticism. Her books are strewn with passages that describe unbridled passion in most exotic terms, without descending into vulgarity…  In fact, in one of the bookstores in Dallas, I picked “Aphrodisiac” – a rare non- fictional book by her about the effects of culinary skills on one’s sexual prowess. It’s quite an odd book, but again well written with a tremendous conviction that she always brings to her writing. She acknowledges her Mother as a role idol in the art of cooking and goes on to describe in great length the benefits of cooking  the right way to ensure prolonged physical ecstasy… Quite an interesting work from this energetic lady!!!

So then, Read Isabel Allende if you want a taste of delicious, vibrant and provocative Latin writing. I promise you - It sure is a connoisseur’s delight ….

God bless…..