Allende leads tour of the Chile she remembers

Jane Hoback, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 30, 2003 at midnight

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Isabel Allende has not lived in Chile since 1975, but it is the country of her nostalgia.

And in her new book, she embarks on an intimate journey through her homeland.

My Invented Country is more meditation than memoir, though, reflections on the land and people who shaped her as a writer, as a woman, as an exile whose destiny it was to be a wanderer.

Allende relies on recollections and reflections, digressions and diversions and what she calls "sentimental whims" to conjure a Chile she castigates for its racism, sexism, classism and brutal political regimes and which she exalts with equal fervor for its beauty and abundance, its "dignified poverty," its stoicism and solidarity and hospitality. It is, she says, "a nation of poets." Allende has a profound sense of place. "We Chileans still feel our bond with the soil."

Hers is a "nation of dramatic topography and diverse climates, studded with capricious obstacles and shaken by the sighs of hundreds of volcanoes, a geological miracle between the heights of the cordillera and the depths of the sea, unified by the obstinate sense of nationhood of its inhabitants."

She delivers an elegant geography lesson, describing the country's regions and landscape. But this is an interior travelogue, not so much a trip through Chile as a trip through this supreme storyteller's memory of it, the memory of a woman who has never had roots and must rely on "a series of illusions, of fleeting images."

These are real events imagined large.

"This happens with many events and anecdotes in my life: It seems I have lived them, but when I write them down in the clear light of logic, they seem unlikely," she writes. "What does it matter if these events happened or if I imagined them? Life is, after all, a dream."

Allende's family members and family matters will be familiar to readers of her novels. Here are the origins of her stories. And she uses them in this book to illustrate certain vices and virtues of the Chilean character. As a scientific method, this may be questionable, but from the literary point of view it has its advantages.

Allende's ribald sense of humor, her bite, her self-deprecation and her sense of the absurd are in fine form here.

But there is tragedy, too. In what Allende calls "historic karma," she says she realized she has experienced two events of chilling coincidence:

On Sept. 11, 1973, her uncle and Chile's president, Salvadore Allende, was assassinated in a military coup orchestrated by the CIA and backed by the Nixon administration, sending her into exile to Venezuela and eventually, circuitously, to San Francisco. And then, at "exactly the same day of the week and month, and at almost the same time in the morning" - the other Sept. 11, 2001.

Allende is deeply political. She calls herself a leftist. The coup that put Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power and began years of repression drove her from her home and her family and spurred her career as a writer and a human rights activist.

But she writes about it here almost perfunctorily. The events are chronicled, the abuses and horrors recounted. And she feels them no less personally. They altered the direction of her life forever. But strangely, they lack the passion, the depth of exploration so evident in the other sections of her book.

Years later, Allende finally returned to Chile and found it much changed. By then, however, she had invented a new home for herself, if an impermanent one, and learned to love it, despite its shortcomings, just as she loves her homeland.

In the memories she has explored, in the stories she has imagined, in the people's lives she has "stolen," Allende has "constructed a land that I call my country. That is where I come from."

It's a journey worth making.



Jane Hoback is an assistant business editor at the Rocky Mountain News.

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