My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
By Isabel Allende, translated from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden
HarperCollins, 199 pages, $23.95
Chilean author Isabel Allende has made a brilliant career for herself over the last two decades as a spirited and prolific storyteller and memoirist, chronicling the secrets of great families, the terrors of political dictatorship and the lust for power. Books like “The House of the Spirits” (1982), Allende’s first and still her most celebrated novel, written when she was almost 40, drew heavily on the colorful characters that were part of her own extended family tree. Old ladies with a taste for the paranormal, bamboozling gypsy women who cast the evil eye on unsuspecting children, and the “occasional ghost of dubious authenticity” became beloved members of Allende’s trademark cast of eccentrics, finding their way into the pages of many of her novels. As Allende has frequently reminded her readers:
“I could never have invented such a clan. Actually, I had no need to, with a family like mine you don’t need imagination.”
If Allende has a tendency to be somewhat modest about her imaginative powers, she nevertheless makes a concerted effort in “My Invented Country” to understand the ways her prodigious imagination has helped her re-create herself and the world around her. A book that is part memoir, part history, part literary journey through time, “My Invented Country” gives Allende the opportunity to re-examine her relationship to Chile, the country that has been the primary source of her expatriate imaginative life, and to explore the acute feelings of homesickness and nostalgia that have animated her work.
“I’d never realized that I write as a constant exercise in longing,” she says in her introduction. “I have been an outsider nearly all my life, a circumstance I accept because I have no alternative. Several times I have found it necessary to pull up stakes, sever all ties, and leave everything behind in order to begin life anew elsewhere; I have been a pilgrim along more roads than I care to remember. From saying good-bye so often my roots have dried up, and I have had to grow others, which, lacking a geography to sink into, have taken hold in my memory.”
A lifelong wanderer, Allende is the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. She was born in Peru and lived in Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, the Middle East and Europe before finding her way to the U.S., marrying an American and making her home in San Francisco. But Allende still maintains a unique relationship to Chile, even though she has lived at a great physical distance from Latin America for so many years. After her uncle, socialist leader Salvador Allende, was killed in a CIA-supported coup in 1973, Allende left Chile with her first husband and her two young children. She went into exile in Venezuela, carrying “a handful of Chilean soil from my garden” and setting to work to reinvent, as only an exiled storyteller could, the beloved country she had left:
“From the instant I crossed the cordillera of the Andes one rainy winter morning, I unconsciously began the process of inventing a country. I have flown over those mountains many times since, and I am always deeply moved because the memory of that morning assaults me full-force as I look down on the magnificent spectacle of the mountains. . . . I have felt the pangs of nostalgia ever since . . . and they did not lessen for many years–until the dictatorship fell and I again stood on the soil of my country. Through the intervening years, I lived with my eyes turned south, listening to the news, waiting for the moment I could go back, as I selected my memories, altered some events, exaggerated or ignored others, refined my emotions, and so gradually constructed the imaginary country in which I have sunk my roots.”
“My Invented Country” sets out to erode the difference between the act of imagining and the act of remembering, ultimately embracing memory as a creative process. Despite her background as a journalist (in the 1960s Allende was a TV reporter and later a writer for a women’s magazine), Allende has learned to mistrust the basic pretexts of objective truth, placing her faith instead in the power of art to animate the past, the present and the future:
“In the slow practice of writing, I have fought with my demons and obsessions, I have explored the corners of memory, I have dredged up stories and people from oblivion, I have stolen others’ lives, and from all this raw material I have constructed a land that I call my country. That is where I come from.” Allende is a masterful storyteller whose work has been translated into more than two dozen languages and whose novels have routinely made their way onto the best-seller lists here and abroad (“My Invented Country” is an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club). But her reflections in “My Invented Country” on nostalgia and the artistic and political challenges of a life in exile are more quaint than compelling, and her efforts to make sense of the problem of national identity fail to capture the quandary of her “vagabond” existence or to pull poetry out of the ontological confusion it incites.
Allende’s strength is as a writer of fiction; she is a talented novelist, not a philosopher. The lasting power of Allende’s intimate and idiosyncratic vision is not to be found in her hackneyed pearls of wisdom about the world but, rather, in the quirky figures populating the imaginative landscapes of her invented country: the cook in Allende’s childhood home in Santiago who had to use a broom to fork out the bodies of the electrocuted cats seeking shelter beneath the stone-age kitchen refrigerator; the uncle, frustrated in love, who lived for more than 30 years in the company of a Methuselah parrot that “swore like a corsair”; the ghost that, during a seance, told Allende’s maternal grandmother about a treasure hidden beneath the stairs, leading the old lady to tear down half the house in a fruitless and frenzied hunt for great riches; the estranged father who disappeared one day “disguised as a Peruvian Indian woman and wearing bright petticoats and a wig with long braids”; the house belonging to her grandfather Agustin that was inhabited by “eccentric humans, half-wild pets, and my grandmother’s ghostly friends, who had followed her from the house on Calle Cueto and who, even after she died, continued to wander through the rooms.” These queer and colorful anecdotes of the Allende clan, many of which will be familiar to loyal readers of Allende’s work, succeed in making “My Invented Country” come alive.
In a moment of lighthearted wisdom, Allende confesses her belief that:
“Most of our lives are similar, and can be told in the tone used to read the telephone directory–unless we decide to give it a little oomph, a little color. In my case, I have tried to polish the details and create my private legend, so that when I am in a nursing home awaiting death I will have something to entertain the other senile old folks with.”
Fortunately we do not have to wait for old age and senility to overtake us in order to feast on Allende’s magnificent tales of life in the old country.
