Saturday, May 17, 2008
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende explains the origins of her new novel, "Zorro," and why her bodice-ripping tale has little to do with "magical realism."
May 19, 2005 | One day in August 2003, a group of strangers knocked on the door of Isabel Allende's house in the exclusive enclave of Santa Rafael, overlooking San Francisco Bay. The imposing wooden door to La Casa de los Espiritus swung open to reveal a diminutive, sparkly-eyed, smooth-skinned woman of indeterminate age who bore only a passing resemblance to the photograph that has adorned Allende's books for the past 20 years. "We own Zorro," the strangers announced. "Yeah?" she replied. "So?"
The strangers were led by John Gertz. In 1920, Gertz's father had bought the rights to the Zorro character from the author of the original dime novel. Together with Disney, he had developed the multiple incarnations of the masked man -- TV series, comic book, feature film -- before Gertz Jr. bought back the rights.
It had occurred to Gertz that Zorro had appeared in films, TV shows, comics -- everything except serious literature. So the search began for a writer for hire, someone to fill in the back story of Zorro, the early years; someone who, like Zorro, knew California well and could think in Spanish; someone with a track record in historical research; someone who could bring a Latin sensibility to the myth of the Mexican-American do-gooder. And so they knocked on Allende's door.
"I said, 'What are you talking about? I'm a serious writer,'" the serious writer explains, sitting in her living room, a picture window providing a backdrop of clouds scudding across the bay. Rather than taking no for an answer, however, the visitors left a box full of Zorro artifacts -- tapes of old movies, comics, recordings of the TV series. "And so I fell in love again with Zorro," she says, in her lilting English, "because I had been in love with him when I was a child. He's the father of Batman and Superman. He's the father of all the action heroes with the double personality. Most of those guys have magic tricks. Zorro has only his own skills."
She prefers not to refer to the job as a commission. "It was a proposition. They said, 'We have the character and you have the talent to write the book. Are you interested?' I said, 'OK, we'll go 50-50.' And that was it."
The decision to become a writer for hire was something Allende had previously resisted. Even the prospect of writing the story of her uncle, Salvador Allende, the former president of Chile who was assassinated in the 1973 coup, had not persuaded her. "I could not be objective," she says. "I don't think I could write a novel about it; it would have to be biography and I am not good at that. I'm not the right person. I'm a lousy journalist because I can't stick to the plain truth; I have to embellish it."
Pablo Neruda put it more plainly. "You must be the worst journalist in the country," the great poet told the young writer. "You're incapable of being objective; you put yourself at the center of everything. I suspect that you lie a lot, and when there is no news, you invent it. Wouldn't it be better to turn to writing novels? In literature, these defects are virtues."
She took the poet's advice. In 1974, she fled her native Chile with her family. They arrived in Venezuela, where Allende's eyes, she says, were opened. "Venezuela is a wild place. It's green, generous; there is something so different from Chile. It's a tropical country, so it has that energy we don't have in Chile. Chile is so restrained, restricted. I found a voice there that I wouldn't have had if I'd stayed in Chile."
A letter written to her ailing grandfather became her first novel, "The House of the Spirits." It established her as a significant voice in the exclusive male pantheon of Latin American fiction. She was, perhaps inevitably, tagged as a proponent of "magical realism," and mention of her name would invariably be followed by that of Gabriel García Márquez. Together with "Of Love and Shadows" and "Portrait in Sepia," the novel eventually became a trilogy. Her other novels, including "Eva Luna" and "Daughter of Fortune," have been notable for the same collision between personal and public histories that so marked out her debut. They are also notable for being bestsellers.
To Allende's delight, the job of writing "Zorro" suited her. "This is totally out of the blue," she says. "I had so much fun writing this. There was no stress involved. My agent was horrified. Everybody was. Why would I do this? For the same reason I would wear the mask and the costume and take fencing classes."
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