My Invented Country : a Memoir, by Isabel Allende
"No one who is born and lives in a natural world like ours can resist writing poetry. In Chile, you lift up a rock, and instead of a lizard out crawls a poet or a balladeer." Isabel Allende, from My Invented Country : a Memoir
Two events led to the writing of My Invented Country : a Memoir -- a comment from Isabel Allende's grandson that reminded her of time's passage and a young man's question at a reading about "the role nostalgia played in my novels." "Nostalgia...'a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. The condition of being homesick.'" With nostalgia as her guide, readers follow Allende into the Chile she both knows and invents. The landscape, her family, the people, history, and politics come alive, along with the meaning of exile.
Allende begins with Chile's landscape, "that remote land few people can locate on the map because it's as far as you can go without falling off the planet." It's an extravagant country, with the dry Atacama Desert to the north and the frigid land of the south. The Andes soar on the eastern border and the Pacific Ocean forms its western edge. Between mountains and coast is the fertile valle central, "a land of grapes and apples." Easter Island, annexed by Chile in 1888, "is lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from continental Chile." It is a violent land of earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, and floods.
Allende tells readers that in order to write about the nostalgia she feels for Chile she must write about family, "because nation and tribe are confused in my mind." And, so, as Allende describes her life and that of her family during "the years of the smoke and carnage of the Second World War," the assassination of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, and the rise of the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, we come to empathize with the Chilean people. And, as Allende remembers her grandfather, grandmother, mother, father, stepfather, marriage, children, and other people and moments in her life, we see into the Chilean temperament and spirit. Allende is funny, too, and gossipy, telling readers that her "worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's."
Near the beginning of My Invented Country : a Memoir, Allende urges readers to "read Neruda" if you want "to see my country with the heart." Yes, read Neruda, but also read Isabel Allende.
"Who, really, are these and the other spirits who live with me? I haven't seen them floating around the hallways of my home, wrapped in white sheets, nothing as interesting as that. They are simply memories that come to me and that from being caressed so often gradually acquire flesh. That happens with people, and also with Chile, that mythic country that from being missed so profoundly has replaced the real country. That country inside my head, as my grandchildren describe it, is a stage on which I place and remove objects, characters, and situations at my whim. Only the landscape remains true and immutable; I am not a foreigner to the majestic landscape of Chile." Isabel Allende, from My Invented Country : a Memoir