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August 3, 2003
Review: Imagining or remembering?
TO readers familiar with Isabel Allende’s books, The House of the Spirits and Paula, her new memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, keeping pace with the scattered events as an exile, native, diplomat’s daughter and immigrant, will be easy. Allende explores the theme of nostalgia and memory in shaping the events of her life and reinvents not just her beloved Chile but herself, which she fled after the CIA-engineered coup toppled President Salvador Allende Gossens on September 11, 1973, and installed a brutal 16-year regime of General Augutso Pinochet. “Word by word I have created the person I am and the invented country in which I live, “ sums up Allende.
Ironically, another event on the same day but two decades apart, on September 11, 2001 with the Twin Tower attacks, offered in “a blood-chilling coincidence — historic karma,” a closure to her wanderings. “That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever again the same: I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever be the same again, and I gained a country.”
Fated to be uprooted, Allende seeks to give the final touches to her literary oeuvre by inviting the reader once again down memory lane. She, however, chooses to re-examine the issues such as nostalgia, migration and exile, with her journalist’s pen, her earlier vocation. The result is smooth and seasoned writing. However, one acutely misses, Allende the master storyteller here. The endearing and mesmerizing characters from her, “house of eccentric humans, half-wild pets and my grandmother’s ghostly friends”, line the memory hall like portraits, smiling down benevolently.
For a first-time reader of Allende, this could be a frustrating experience as the characters beckon from her earlier works. As Allende writes, “My relatives serve to illustrate certain vices and virtues of the Chilean character. As a scientific method this may be questionable, but from a literary point of view it has its advantages.”
Also, if uninformed about her wanderings, it leaves one with the urge to put down the book and pick up her earlier memoir instead. The flow interrupted frequently with Allende dispensing with details in a sentence like, “I won’t expand on that here since I have already recounted it in the final chapters of my first novel and in my memoir Paula.”
Born in Peru, her diplomatic destiny as daughter of a Chilean embassy official took her to Beirut and La Paz. Allende went into exile to Venezuela, “carrying a handful of Chilean soil from my garden,” and after all the intermittent anguish of rootlessness, she settled down with a San Francisco native because of her Chilean virtue of a “strongly developed nesting instinct”.
The book is a lesson in history, politics, geography and national traits of the Chilean people. Allende takes in broad swathes of the country’s ups and downs. In her attempts, most of the time she leads the reader with her enticing writing through these labyrinthine lanes with an evocative description of Chile. She concedes that she exaggerates and embellishes, placing her faith in her art, as she claims, “Memory is conditioned by emotion... 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 colour.” So, we encounter a Chile that Allende has described, “by selecting pieces that fit my design and ignore the others.”
Allende gives us a Chile that is “poetic and poor”, mirrored in Neruda’s mournful lines, outlines its unique topography, “a lance to the south of the south of America”, a country where religion is ritualistic and colourful despite being “more Catholic than Ireland” and “even cults have a Christian bent”.
With all the clever anecdotes, Allende sometimes falters with contradictions. Chileans are a “sober and serious people”, “like to laugh even though deep down we prefer seriousness”. Many of her generalizations are a perfect fit for Pakistan. “Chileans like authority. They believed that the military was going to ‘clean up’ the country.” “Relatives who don’t speak to you are a common occurrence.” Chilean women are abettors of machismo” And her own experience, “I remember fear as a permanent metallic taste in my mouth.”
Allende does not write about her uncle Salvador Allende as she does about the rest of her clan. There is not much of Pinochet’s Chile too. But then again, Allende writes, “I would not be a writer had I not experienced that exile.” The book succeeds in Allende’s attempt to do away with the differences between imagining and remembering. “You remember things that never happened,” wrote her granddaughter Andrea about Allende in a school composition.
Her eloquent turn of phrase and stringing myriad images make for lyrical sentences full of insight and humour. “We Chileans like the Germans for their sausage, their beer, and their Prussian helmets, as well as the goose step our military adopted for parades, but in practice we try to emulate the English.” Along the way, we discover Allende an unabashedly spirited woman. In the end, the book mirrors memory’s defiant blueprints, at times like quicksilver, at times detailed, but never monotonous.
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
By Isabel Allende
HarperCollins
ISBN 006054564X
199pp. US$23.95
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