Isabel Allende Looks Back in Affection

Isabel Allende on feminism: "We are 51 percent of the population; we can do it. So get on your high heels and fight, ladies."

By Christy Karras The Salt Lake Tribune

    Sometimes, the most accurate pictures are made from a distance.     Isabel Allende's My Invented Country is a view of a place, its customs and its people, through the eyes of one looking back after years of exile.     It is full of cheerful generalities ("We Chileans are envious; we Chileans enjoy funerals; the Chilean loves laws") but also contains particular memories that increasingly pop up, Allende says, as she gets older. Like those memories, written gems pop out of her memoir. One example: "My clairvoyant grandmother died suddenly of leukemia. She didn't fight for life, she gave herself to death enthusiastically because she was very curious to see heaven."     The book is written in an honest and straightforward manner, almost as if she were answering a reader's question: "Where did you come from?"     In person, Allende speaks much the same way, with a conversational thread that addresses many subjects but hangs together, expressing her opinions candidly but always avoiding the impression of hauteur. Impeccably dressed, looking slender and younger than her 60 years, she gave The Salt Lake Tribune an interview when she traveled to Utah earlier this year to help open the new Salt Lake City Public Library -- a rare event, since she almost never travels when she has just started a new book.     My Invented Country began as an assignment from National Geographic, which asked her to write an essay on her sense of place. "The only place I could think of was Chile," she said -- an odd realization, since she had not lived there for nearly three decades.

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    Allende grew up in Chile but left after half her family was forced out of the country by a CIA-backed coup against its elected socialist president, her father's cousin Salvador Allende, in 1973 (Allende points out that the date was a Tuesday, Sept. 11).     During Allende's term, "I have never felt so alive, nor have I ever again participated so closely in a community or the life of a nation," she wrote in the book. The government was removed by a Cold War America fearing socialism in any form and replaced with Augusto Pinochet's military government, and "democracy was replaced by a regimen of terror that was to last sixteen years and leave its consequences for a quarter of a century."     She calls her take on life "half and half, good and bad," a description that also fits her depiction of Chile itself. In the 1960s and '70s, the country was mired in economic depression, but she remembers it filled with pristine nature and resilient, hospitable people. "I have traveled a lot, and I have never seen any place as beautiful as the south of Chile -- lakes, volcanoes, wonderful rushing rivers -- it's like Switzerland but rougher," she said.     The text ranges from fuzzy sentimentalism to clear-eyed realism to sharp sarcasm. Allende looks on her childhood, for example, and writes, "In those days there was no such term as 'abused children,' it was accepted that the best way to bring up little ones was with a strap in one hand and a cross in the other."     Allende also describes going through most of her life believing she didn't fit in anywhere -- a feeling that ultimately led her to write. "It gives me a sort of perspective which is the perspective of the outsider, which is good for a writer," she said.     As a child, she loved to read, but "there were no role models for women to be creative in any way," she said. She worked as a teacher and a journalist, but it was a long time before she dared think of herself as a fiction writer.     In 1981, she started writing a letter for her grandfather, who was dying in Chile. The result was The House of the Spirits, arguably the most beloved of her 10 books.     "From the first page, I knew it was going to be something different," she said. "By the end of the year, I had 500 pages of something, but I still didn't know what it was." After her mother and engineer husband read it and picked out all the mistakes, she had a coherent story. At a time when women writers were largely frowned upon in South America, the only publisher willing to take on the manuscript was in Spain. Her book quickly took off in Europe, then elsewhere after being translated out of Spanish, the language she still uses to write.     She wrote even while holding other jobs and raising children. "It's nice to have a room of your own and some time, but if you don't, you do it anyway. This is like making love when you're in love: You do it behind a door, if you have to."     Allende calls America home now, and she loves many things about her adopted country. Here, she is surrounded by children, related by blood or not, and friends she invites over on weekends.     She is still deeply affected by memories of the fear, suspicion and violence that overtook Chile while she became an exile, roaming first to Venezuela and then to the United States. Now, she is wary of attempts to bring democracy to Iraq. "How can you impose democracy and the American way of life anywhere?" she asks. "That's what the Nazis tried to do, impose their way of life on the rest of the world. I have seen a lot of violence in my life, and I know it never has a good effect. Never. Everything comes back to you, if you live long enough. And if it doesn't come back to you, it comes back to your children."     Allende has long been outspoken about social and environmental issues. In Chile, Allende's relatives and acquaintances discouraged her views on women's rights, but she was and remains an outspoken feminist, willing to criticize women who comfortably sit back and enjoy the fruits of their predecessors' labors while women around the world go without.     "The women who think that feminism is personal are those privileged women who have access to education and health care in industrialized nations, in urban areas," she says with fervor. "The rest of the world -- Africa, Asia, poor America -- those women have not heard the news yet. Take a look at your sisters."     Her message to other women: "Make fun of all this stupidity, and change the world. We are 51 percent of the population; we can do it. So get on your high heels and fight, ladies."