Monday, Jul 7, 2008
Her books don't get edited, she says Latin lovers make lousy husbands and her daughter's pornographic letters are a great read.
Mar 5, 2001 | Isabel Allende may be a little in love with the risqué. She celebrated her 50th birthday by publishing a reverie on aphrodisiacs, complete with her mother's erotic recipes. She confesses to a fantasy of swimming in rice pudding: "I dived in, and that delicious creaminess caressed my skin, slipped into all the crevices of my body, filled my mouth." She tells me that she has read her daughter's love letters and that they are "pornographic" and "wonderful."
Certainly, the Chilean writer, who stormed onto the literary scene nearly two decades ago with the magic realist hit "The House of the Spirits," does not stifle concupiscence. Her novels abound with secret basement love nests, illicit couples tiptoeing through snoring houses and aching for a hidden corner and the repeated rape of servant girls by a desirous patron. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani derided Allende's most recent novel, "Daughter of Fortune," as a "bodice-ripper romance"; Allende says her readers were outraged that there wasn't more action.
Going through her stream-of-consciousness, autobiographical writing, though, she's really not a sensationalist; she's just at ease with sexuality -- playful, spirited, unabashed. Maybe she is the quintessential Latin lover. I see her at a book reading and find that her compact 5-foot frame is graciously buttressed by curves like those you'd find on a New Age fertility goddess; her jovial eyes captivate the almost all-female crowd.
She writes with abundance, never offering a quiet meal when a boisterous crowd can feast on "puff pastries, delicious vegetarian dishes, spongy tortillas and enormous cheeses from the countryside" (this while "fasting" during Holy Week). Common objects become animate beings, descriptions take on palpability; an aging boat, for example, is a ship "crisscrossed with ancient marine scars, a crust of mollusks on her matronly hips, exhausted joints moaned in the pounding seas."
Allende tells me -- as if you can read her work and not know -- that she is a passionate person. Through her seven books (all of them bestsellers in at least one of the nearly 30 languages in which they are published), she suggests that some part of her psyche still inhabits a culture light-years removed from the liberal San Francisco Bay Area where she now lives. In that remembered place, there is brutal machismo, there is an entire language just for love and there is a power to sensuality and mystery that doesn't coexist easily with the rational and pragmatic United States. In her writing, Allende chases that past with the gleeful determination of a child desperate to catch a miracle of color and life in a butterfly net. She is drawn inexorably to the years spent in Chile, between her childhood abroad as a diplomat's daughter and her adulthood abroad, first as an exile in Venezuela during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (who overthrew her uncle, Chilean President Salvador Allende), and now as an immigrant to California. Many of the seemingly tall tales wrapped into Allende's impassioned love stories find roots, or at least inspiration, in her own familial legends.
She pulls the cover off some of these personal secrets in "Paula," a family memoir written to her dying daughter, and in "Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses." This ancestral lore is lush with humor and preposterousness. Allende's grandmother is a clairvoyant, who uses her telepathy to send a sugar bowl skittering across the table. Her mother-in-law sits bare-bottomed in the living room, entertaining guests as she potty-trains Paula. Allende's memories of this fantastical family have been steeped, no doubt, in her potent imagination, but not a word seems phony. Just the opposite. I fear Allende may be too truthful.
I find myself nervous for the friends and family who appear in her books: the ex-husband who must suffer her admission of cheating on him; the son, whose love life I surreptitiously track, meeting his wife in one book, and a new girlfriend in the next. I'm taken aback when Allende identifies by name those who've inspired characters in her novels, and even hints at one friend she's saving for a future tale.
Allende may be a little in love with other people's stories. No, it's more than that. She is a top-notch, passionate story snitcher. And I find myself wondering if the people who know her best don't demand immunity from fictionalization.
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