MIAMI.- Chilean writer and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Isabel Allende It’s her birthday, and on this occasion, when the author celebrates her 82nd birthday, THE AMERICAS DAILY share some of the books highlights of someone who has sold more than 73 million copies translated into 42 languages.
The house of the spirits (1982)
Published in Barcelona by Plaza & Jans in 1982, The house of the spirits This is Isabel Allende’s first novel. Classified as magical realism, the author tells the story of the Trueba family over four generations from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s and follows the social and political movements of the post-viceregal period in Chile.
Of Love and Shadows (1984)
Allende’s second novel – published by Editorial Sudamericana in 1984 during her exile in Venezuela – is the story of a woman and a man who fell in love with each other completely, thus saving themselves from a vulgar story. The novel contains the themes around which love and hate revolve: the events of the work develop around these two feelings as if they were two probable paths that fight to overcome one another.
Eva Luna (1987)
Once again, considering Chile as an inspiration, Isabel tells the story of Eva Luna: her mother, Consuelo, who was a redhead, was rescued by some Indians and at the age of 12 she was sent to the city, to the convent of the Little Sisters of Charity. She then went to work in the home of a doctor, Professor Jones, who dedicated his time to embalming corpses. Here, she meets an Indian gardener who ends up being poisoned by a snake, and she takes care of him in a somewhat carnal way. From this relationship, Eva Luna is born in a room in the mansion where Consuelo worked, and is helped in childbirth by another servant, who is later consecrated as Eva’s godmother.
The infinite plan (1991)
After being a nomad in the company of his father, his mother, his sister and an eccentric wife, Greg Reeves radically changes his environment when he finds himself living as a foreigner in the Latin neighborhood of Los Angeles. There he experiences racism, becomes friends with Carmen Morales and becomes involved in the transformation of his family dynamics, his introduction to the Vietnam War and a constant internal transformation dependent on the settings in which he lives.
Paula (1994)
The autobiographical work begins as a letter to her daughter, Paula, who in December 1991 fell into a coma and was hospitalized in Madrid. It was in that hospital that the author began the first lines of her story, from her parents’ parents, her childhood, her doubts and romances, her experiences and the most unlikely anecdotes, family and personal. An outburst in the face of tragedy, a communication from a desperate mother at the beginning and resigned at the end. Throughout the novel, and between the story of the military coup, and the family’s travels, one can perceive how the author gradually accepts that her daughter is no longer in that sleeping body.
The city of beasts (2002)
The young adult novel tells the story of Alexander Cold, a 15-year-old American boy who travels with his grandmother – the writer Kate Cold – to the Amazon as part of an expedition of the fictional magazine International GeographicThe purpose is to document the existence of a strange creature known as the beast, considered a local myth.
My invented country (2003)
In her autobiographical work, Isabel Allende recounts her memoirs in which truth is mixed with fiction. In the novel, the author recounts her childhood and youth, spent in Chile during the government of her uncle Salvador Allende and the subsequent exile when he was overthrown by Pinochet.
Zorro: the legend begins (2005)
The future Zorro was a mestizo born in the 1790s in Alta California, the son of the Asturian captain Don Alejandro de la Vega and an Amerindian warrior, Toypurnia. Young Diego is sent to Barcelona by his father to complete his education, shortly before Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Army invades Spain.
Maya’s notebook (2011)
The novel tells the story of Maya Vidal, an American teenager whose mother left her at her grandparents’ house when she was a baby and did not see her again until several years later, during which time the girl invented an image of her mother, coming to believe that she was a princess.
Long sea petal (2019)
In her 28th novel, declared the most popular in Spain in 2017, Allende tells the story of doctor Victor Dalmau who, along with his friend and pianist Roser Bruguera, is forced into exile from Barcelona, Spain, due to the Civil War and travels to Chile aboard Pablo Neruda’s ship Winnipeg.
Violet (2022)
Published on January 25, 2022, the novel tells the epic and exciting story of a woman whose life spans the most relevant historical moments of the 20th century: from 1920 – with the so-called Spanish flu – to 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The wind knows my name (2023)
In The wind knows my namethe author’s most recent work, tells a story of violence, love, displacement and hope: in Vienna in 1938, Samuel Adler is a 6-year-old Jewish boy whose father disappears during Kristallnacht, when his family loses everything. His desperate mother finds him a seat on a train that will take him from Nazi Austria to England. Samuel embarks on a new stage with his trusty violin and with the weight of loneliness and uncertainty, which will always accompany him throughout his long life.
About Isabel Allende
She is one of the most widely read authors in the world with more than 75 million books sold. Isabel, Chilean born in Peru in 1982, gained worldwide recognition with the publication of her first novel, The house of the spiritswhich began as a farewell letter to his dying grandfather.
Since then, he has written more than 25 works that have received critical acclaim.
“(My passion for letters and writing) I suppose it started with reading a lot. I was born in a time in Chile when there was no television, they never took me to the movies, there was no entertainment as a child other than reading, and I read everything that fell into my hands. Later I was a journalist and in journalism I became familiar with language, how to tell something to capture the reader’s attention, so that the reader stays with me; how to tell a story that is true, but in a very interesting way. Then I moved on to literature by chance, because I could not continue working as a journalist after I left Chile into exile,” Isabel Allende said in an interview for The Pas in the special BBVA we learn together.