My review of Isabel Allende's My Invented Country

This came out in The Star today. I apologise for my rather unwieldy language structure. Should had edited this piece more rigorously. I've taken the libery to amend here, some glaring grammatical mistakes that are found in the original copy.
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Bookshelf
Friday April 14, 2006

A life bound to homeland

Review by CLARISSA LEE

My Invented Country – A Memoir

Author: Isabel Allende

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 224 pages



THIS mesmerising memoir of Isabel Allende allows us a peek into the forces that have shaped the woman into a well-loved storyteller, who, despite meandering in and out of her main tale with little anecdotes and asides, never loses track of her original narrative, but masterfully weaves all the bits and pieces into the mother tale. She is just at home writing tales of epic proportions such as The House of Spirits as she is in giving us little tales of love and food through Aphrodite: The Love of Food and the Food of Love.

In this memoir, Allende superbly balances between revealing details that might be considered intimate, of some of her relatives and friends, but not unmasking them completely or depriving them of their privacies. It is as we know so much about them, while not really knowing them. It is the same when she talks about herself, or her innermost thoughts. But it is her style of keeping the reader in suspense as she brings us closer and closer to her psyche, often pulling us out without our realising it until we notice that she has ceased speaking of the intimate and are regaling us with tales of her native country and its people.

Yet it is in her telling us of the little known aspects of her country (to foreigners) that inevitably bring us up close with her unpredictability, to the capriciousness of humanity, and unveil to her readers the soil of her roots that is firmly packed at the core of her being. In reading Allende’s description of Chile, I am reminded of how like Malaysia it is in terms of its hospitality, its vastly uncritical society and the people’s strong patriotrism that brooks no insults or criticism from strangers to the land. Every social trespass is heavily frowned upon, the Chileans make a national pastime out of complaining about society and themselves, inefficiency and bureaucracy are a way of life, and patriachalism reigns supreme.

The people are stoic and perhaps fatalistic in their view of life, and most are highly religious. Divorce in Chile is near impossible, due to the insurmountable red tape and apathy, so couples seeking formal separation are caught in a legal bind. Moreover, Chile is still in the grip of class-consciousness, whereby the more European you look, the better your pedigree is considered, whereas if you look completely “native”, you are considered inferior. Such an attitude is not alien in many former colonies. However, make no mistake, Allende loves her native land, for all its faults and blemishes.

The memoir does not go in a linear order, even if it is chronological in detailing the events of her life, and of her people. We get an idea of Allende’s early years that have shaped her to be the kind of writer she is today. We know that Latin America has been successful in bringing forth great writers who are loved the world over, and from Chile, besides Allende, we know of Pablo Neruda and a few others.

Allende alludes to an oral tradition of poetry and folklore that has never been lost to its people, and thus it was but a small leap to go from that to writing modern poetry and novels. She also paints for us the beauty of the Chilean landscape, the beauty that had made it the muse of its literature, universally understood by readers worldwide.

Neruda, Allende and many Latin American writers have been translated into many different languages, and as I read her memoir that has been translated from Spanish to English, the lyrical beauty of her language, as well as the unrelenting and profound narrative, remain intact and forceful.

More importantly, she talks about how being uprooted and having to live life over more than once, in different countries, from the time of her youth, have made her write compulsively in order to grasp an identity that is altogether tenuous and elusive. Her notion of the “invented country”, her memories and inventive attribution to her former homeland, to the Chile she has left behind physically but lives on in her imagination, is reminiscent of Rushdie’s anecdote of the “childhood” home he had never been in, but which became very real to him by way of the sepia photograph he gazed at daily as a child.

The imaginary homeland gave such writers, who have the perspective of outsiders, the freedom to place the beauty of a homeland in the foreground while engaging with its reality from afar. While remaining loyal to the spirit of their homeland, they give it critical consideration.

On hindsight, a newcomer to Allende would definitely get a good introductory account to her literary motivations (and be entertained by a remarkably entertaining writer) and her fans will get an ever closer view of the writer whose stories they adore.