Isabel Allende
Latin-American Author
An Evening with Isabel Allende
Hosted by David T. Gies, Professor of Spanish
January 18, 2002

David Gies: Jonathan Yardley wrote in the October 28 2001 issue of the Washington Post Book World: "Isabell Allende’s new novel is big, ambitious and far ranging. In a time when too many fiction writers are content to remain in the comfortable cocoons of their own psyches, exploring their own inner worlds and ignoring the vast difficult one outside, Allende has grabbed a brass ring and given it a fierce shake. Portrait in Sepia is about grand subjects, love, war, identity, betrayal, and it treats them in a grand manner. Allende has a lot to say, and she says it beautifully."

So, my question is what do you think you are saying in Portrait in Sepia? What is this novel about and what is it saying to you?

Isabel Allende: When I sat down to write the novel, I wanted to tell about a time–the second half of the 19^th century in Chile, which is a wonderful time of war and revolution and identity. It is a time in which, I think most of the national character was forged. Chile, at the time, had six wars, one of which was against Peru and Bolivia and took away such territory from them that the country almost doubled its size.

So I wanted to write about that time because I think that many things that happened later in Chile in 1973, had an echo a century before during that great time of violence and cruelty. That was my research. But of course, in the research many wonderful things happened that I discovered I had many venues I had not thought about. I knew that I wanted to write the story told through the eyes of a woman, because it is always easier for me. After the Oprah Show, many people, who were not my usual readers, started reading my books, and I started getting letters from people that were quite unexpected. Most of the letters said that they did not like the ending of Daughter of Fortune because it is an open ending. My mother complained, too, that "these people don’t even have sex! What’s wrong with them?" What I tried to explain to Oprah and everyone else is that Daughter of Fortune is about freedom, it is not really a love story. Nobody wanted to believe me and I couldn’t go to every reader and him that this is what it is about.

Everybody wanted a sequel. When I started writing Portrait In Sepia, I realized that, given the time frame, I could pick up some characters from Daughter of Fortune and bring them into this book without writing a sequel, and have the sex scene that I skipped before (which really helped in many ways). I made my protagonist the granddaughter of the protagonist in Daughter of Fortune and what I intended to do was to just tell a story. Very often, when I am writing, I get desperate because I feel that I am the worst writer in this world and that it is never going to come out, it is totally confused, and it is just terrible. I told Willie, my husband: "Willie, it’s over. I’m done. I’m just too old, I can’t do this." And Willie always says, "just tell the story."

That is what it is about. If you plan to give an epic view of in the 19^th century of Chile, it is preachy, shitty book! You have to write from the heart in a modest way, and whatever comes out is an offering and people take it or leave it. But that is all you can do as a writer.

Gies: What are you offering? What is in your hear that you would like readers to connect with?

Allende: People. I want people to love each other, to like each other, to know each other, to look at each other in the face and see the humanity in each other. That is why I write about different races, about people from different backgrounds, about immigrants, and people who are confronted with pain and loss. And then, in that moment of great loss, these people all of the sudden see the face of the enemy--and there is no enemy, it is just another person who is in pain as well. I find that fascinating because that has been my life experience. I write about strong women because I don’t know any weak women. I really don’t know any. I don’t invent strong women for my books, I just pick them up from in the street, and those are the women I know. I’m not kidding! I’m the kind of person who overhears conversations in a restaurant and writes them down in the napkin, and those are the characters in my books. And those are the stories in my books.

Gies: I think that the strong women angle is very clear in your novels. And yet, several of your characters make comments to the effect that they wish they had been born a man. Why and what does that mean?

Allende: Cellulite first–no kidding. Remember I was born during WWII in a very conservative, traditional Catholic family in Chile, which is the end of the world. Women did not have the same opportunities. I hardly finished school because it was not important for women to be educated. I was supposed to be somebody’s wife. I was for 25 eternal years. I was supposed to be somebody’s mother, and that was my fate. I belonged to the first generation of organized feminists in Chile–we were five, and we made a difference. For me, that is very important. That has been a mission in my life, always.

Gies: But how does one come from a group of five organized feminists to become one of the, or perhaps the best-selling woman novelist in the world. What is that trajectory, how do you deal with it?

Allende: It’s luck. It is just incredible luck. Every year, 360,000 works of fiction are published in the world. Now why some of those connect with the readership, nobody knows, there is no formula why some books make it and why some great books don’t. I think that there is the offering, which in this case is the book, and the need. If you don’t connect the need of the readership at a certain point and a certain time, it doesn’t work. So if you are twenty years ahead or twenty years behind or even two years ahead, you don’t connect. I have been extremely lucky to be able to connect every time with something that is in the air. I think I have some sort of antenna that is up there and I pick up something without even knowing. That something is something that people give me, and it comes into the writing in mysterious ways.

Gies: You have told the story, and I am sure that all of us know it, about the genesis of the House of the Spirits–the famous letter to your grandfather in which you tell him your story that became that wonderful novel. Now that he is no longer here, where do you get your ideas? Where are the letters, where are your ideas coming from?

Allende: With a family like mine, you don’t need to invent anything. For the rest of my life I have material for magic realism. But also, I observe–I watch, I listen. Everyone has a story. There are big themes that I am interested in. I don’t even know when I start writing what the theme of the book is. Often, the critics tell me afterward, or some moviemaker comes with a notion. I try to write in the most honest possible way, which is not always easy because one acquires tricks of the craft and I try not to use them. I try not to use any formula or anything like that. I write from the heart. Then when the book is finished, sometimes the book ends suddenly because suddenly, I realize what the book is about. That happened with Daughter of Fortune. I was writing the story of this woman who comes to the gold rush, and she is looking for a lover that left her, and she never finds that lover. Eventually she is confronted with the head of -------- in a jar. Is that the man she was looking for or not? The reader doesn’t know, and really I, as the writer, do not know. But then, looking at the jar, she says, and this is something quite unexpected to me, "I am free now." And the next day I came to write the last chapter. I turned on my computer, and there was the sentence, "I am free now," and I said that there was nothing to ad. This is the end of the book. This book is not about finding a lover. This is about this woman who comes from Victorian times from the end of the world into a masculine world loaded with testosterone (like the world we are living in now, for goodness sakes) and she has to survive with no tools and no knowledge. She dresses like a man and tries to survive. She finds something that is as precious as love itself–she finds freedom in a time when women have none. So, the books sort of unfolds and comes to life. The characters do things that aren’t expected. All of the sudden you find yourself writing about something that you didn’t know you were writing.

Gies: I think about the House of the Spirits, a movie that I quite liked and the critics did not seem to be as happy about it as the rest of us. It starred Glen Close, Winona Ryder, Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas. What was your reaction to the filming of your book to the result of the film, and, will there be other films of any of your books?

Allende: Right now, Julie Tamer, the woman who did The Lion King, is interested in doing Daughter of Fortune. There is no interest reported in In Sepia, yet. When they did the House of the Spirits, I thought that it was a very elegant and honorable result. I liked it. Of course it does not have a lot in flavor, but it is German money, a Danish director, filmed in English, with and Anglo cast. What do you expect? But, the story works.

Gies: I suppose that the reaction to the film is a testimony to the depth of the novel. It was really very powerful. On the theme of spirits–we know that every January 8^th you light a candle and begin a new novel. I wanted to light a candle here, but the fire marshals told me that if we did so, we would all be hosed down. What do spirits mean to you? What kind of spirituality do you have? Why are spirits so important?

Allende: I have been a displaced person all my life. I have been the daughter of diplomats, a traveler, an exile for 16 years, and now an immigrant in the United States for the last 15 years, so I don’t have roots in a place, I have roots in my memory. In a way I have been growing roots in my books–growing a universe in which I dwell. Memory and spirits are very close, they are related. What are spirits to me? I am not hearing voices, not yet, and I am not seeing things, but I spend a lot of time alone and in silence. I think that allows me a place where I can go into and seek connections--a place where the instinct has a chance to perceive things where most of the time it does not because we are in the noise of the world. So, the spirits are memories, dreams, emotions, passions, connections, incredible coincidences, unexplainable incidences that happen all the time, and signs that I see everywhere, that if you are just quiet and still enough to hear them, you will see them. But we are, of course, running from one cappuccino to the next and we don’t have any possibility of seeing them. As a writer I have spent a lot of time alone, and that helps. My spirits are not ghosts, they have nothing to do with religion because I am not a religious person–I have a spiritual practice, but I am not religious. Why would I belong to a club that is run by single old men? No way. Celibate old men who have an opinion about contraception–isn’t that amazing? So, I do not belong to that club. But I was raised a Catholic and I need a spiritual practice of some kind because I do believe that we have something else, not only the material body and mind, but there is something else that transcends, and it is something very wonderful. I want to give some time and some time to that.

Gies: Is your family, both past and present, part of that group of spirits that you think about?

Allende: Yes. My grandmother who was the model for Gladine in the House of the Spirits was such a wonderful human being that I didn’t have to invent much when I wrote the book. She spent her life experimenting with the paranormal. They said that she could play the piano with the lid on, but that’s not true because she couldn’t play the piano at all. But, she could move objects with her mind, and she was trying to experiment with telepathy. She had a couple of friends and they would pass recipes for apple pies from one end of the city to the other with telepathy. It didn’t work either, but you see that the telephone didn’t work at this time either. So, it wasn’t any better or worse than the Telephone Company. I grew up with this. Every Thursday evening there was a séance at home, and there was nothing spooky about this, it was just very casual. I was a very young child who was always present. So this idea that there was another dimension of reality, that there was this possibility of talking to spirits, was very much in my family while I was growing up. My grandfather, on the other hand, was a pragmatic basque (???), who didn’t believe in any of this. Then my grandmother, one day, came up with this idea that maybe it was not the souls of the dead that were moving the three-legged table, but extraterrestrials. And my grandfather thought that that was very scientific and so he would participate in the séances because it was the extraterrestrials.

Gies: Since this is a local audience, UVA, Charlottesville and the surrounding atmosphere, many of you know that Isabelle’s daughter, Paola, was a TA in the Spanish Department for two years, and took a master’s degree in psychology here at UVA, graduating in 1989. Paola died in 1992, as Isabelle has recounted so powerfully in the book, Paola. I’m wondering if you would be willing to share any memories or anecdotes of Paola and of the time the two of you taught that wonderful course for our graduate students together, here. What do you remember about Paola, UVA and Charlottesville?

Allende: Well, at the time, we were living in Venezuela, and Paola finished her school and wanted to study in the United States, so she applied to several universities. We were waiting for the results when I got your letter, inviting me to come to teach. So, I answered saying, "If you can get Paola in, I come." And so he said, it doesn’t work that way in the United States. I said that it works that way everywhere. So, he got her in and I came, of course. We ended up teaching together a wonderful course on the reality of Latin America seen through films. She helped me to choose the themes we would talk about. She was very organized. She had a great mind. I had to give three lectures at the University at the time. Paola was terribly embarrassed because her Mother was going to be there and then all her peers were going to be sitting there and it would be just so embarrassing. I told this story that had recently happened, because Paola, when we were living in Venezuela and she was studying psychology decided to specialize in human sexuality. I said, "Paola, that is not such a good idea." She said, "I’m going to do it anyhow, mother." I said, "Paola, men don’t like to be compared. If you have too much knowledge, you won’t ever get a boyfriend!" At the time I had to go to the Netherlands. I went to Amsterdam and she had given me a list of things that I had to bring. I finished my work and went to the place that she had indicated on the map, and I ended up in the red light district of Amsterdam at night, going down some stairs into the first porn shop that I had ever seen–I didn’t know those things existed. The person who was selling the stuff was a sort of ant–an elderly Dutch lady, very seriously dressed in black. She was explaining, in broken English, what these things were for and I didn’t want to listen. I said for her to just get me what was on the list and that’s it. So, I ended with a big plastic bag of all kinds of rubber devices and things that would vibrate in the bag. That was not the most embarrassing thing. The most embarrassing thing was going through Customs when they opened the luggage and they extracted these things. Everyone was showing them around and calling each other. I had t o explain that they were not for me but for my daughter. I told the story and Paola just about disappeared when I told it. She said to me, "How could you do this to me? Now how can I possibly look at my peers in this University? I will have to leave." She was desperate.

Gies: Paola was an extraordinary woman. Those of us who remember her, remember her very fondly. You wrote, in Paola, I kind of open autobiography story about her life and your own life, and yet it is a book that should be terribly depressing and awful and it is not. One reads it and one comes out of it with a transcendent sense of well being which is puzzling for me. How do you write a book that is so profoundly moving that is about such a terrible loss? And yet, make all of us feel good about it? How do you make that event lead to something not so horrible.

Allende: It was not so horrible. I came to terms with the fact that we are all going to die. Death is a terrible inconvenience, but it is not an obstacle for communication of love. I feel that Paola is very much with me all the time as my grandparents are, as my mother is–she’s alive, but she’s not here. She is in Chile and I am always in touch with her, emotionally and spiritually. But with Paola, it is a sense that she is almost present. She was sick for a year. Paola had a rare condition ??? which is very rare and should not be fatal, today. She was living in Madrid, recently married, and she got a cold. She went to the hospital with a cold, in a taxi, and she never came out. 5 months later, when they gave me back my daughter, she was in a vegetative state–totally paralyzed. Her brain was gone. And I wondered then, as I had for a long time, why she did not die at the beginning? Why her husband and I had not disconnected her at the very beginning? This question, which is very reasonable today, at the moment there in Madrid when the doctors were saying that she was going to recover, we did the best we knew with the knowledge we had, which wasn’t much. And I wonder why she stayed alive, because when we finally disconnected her, she started breathing. At that point, I took her to her house in California, thanks to her husband who was very generous and allowed me to take my daughter back. During that year that we took care of her at home, we learned so much. It was a time in which I remember there were moments when I was running through the woods, screaming and it was raining. There were other moments when we were just laughing and were wonderful. I also came to realize that her body had changed–you could hardly recognize her. Her mind was gone and yet she was there. There was something that I couldn’t pinpoint and it was her, still. And that went when she died, but I didn’t get the feeling it had died–it had gone somewhere. A few months later, my granddaughter was born. I was so lucky that I was able to cut the umbilical cord and receive her. The night that Paola died in that room, there was stillness, a silence, something very mysterious–very transcendent. It’s something that I can’t explain. I have the feeling that the room was full of people. And actually, Willie said later that it was only four of us, but I thought that everybody was there–that it was full of people. And then, months later when Nicole was born, it was the same thing–the same feeling of stillness, something sacred and mysterious, something wonderful and stressful, but not horrible. This coming through the threshold into the world was no different was not different than going through the threshold to the other world. That knowledge, first of all, took away the fear of death. Then, it made me very detached from trying to control things. I’m still passionate about ideas and people and things, but I’m not as attached as I was before. I don’t try to control anything because it is useless. I learned because I was able to live that year with her. If she would have died at the beginning, I don’t think I would have learned anything–I would have just been enraged.

Gies: Did Paola help you, in that year when she was in a coma, spiritually? Did she ever help you come to terms with this--come to a realization of what death is as a passage, or help you make a decision?

Allende: I don’t know. There was absolutely nothing there. I would stare at her for hours trying to see any sign of anything, and there was nothing. When she was gone, finally, I had the feeling that I had lost everything–first her body, her mind, her voice, her laughter, her company–and now, even her spirit was gone. There was nothing left. And then, I would only say a few minutes later, I realized that I had something left that could never be taken away from me, and something that is very wonderful. And, that is the love I had given her that maybe she did not receive because she was in such a condition. I don’t know if she was aware at all. According to the doctor, she was not. She could have been in an institution, and she would have not been aware. But, the love that my family and I gave her was still there. It still is. So, I realized that the only thing that one has, after throwing everything else overboard, is the love that one can give–not even the love one receives. And that is wonderful because I tend to be very passionate and I want everyone to adore me. But, that doesn’t matter. The important thing is to adore other people.