In 1988 Isabel Allende published Eva Luna, a novel that recounted the adventurous life of a poor young Latin American woman who finds friendship, love and some measure of worldly success through her powers as a storyteller. Her most ambitious novel to date, Eva Luna was described by the Washington Post as a “cascade of stories [that] tumbles out before the reader, stories vivid, passionate and human.” Now in The Stories of Eva Luna, she again presents to us a treasure trove of such stories, showing once more why Eva Luna (and her much-celebrated creator) has now such a large and devoted readership.
It begins with Rolf Carlé, the European refugee, journalist and lover who figured so largely in her last book. Lying in bed with Eva Luna, he asks her to tell him a story. “What about?” she asks. “Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me.” And so she does, giving Rolf Carlé and the reader twenty-three vibrant, enchanting demonstrations of her artistry. Here are campesinos and rich people, guerrillas and fortunetellers, great beauties and tyrants, the foreign rendered indelibly familiar. Here is Clarisa, “born before the city had electricity, she lived to see television coverage of the first astronaut levitating on the moon, and she died of amazement when the Pope came for a visit and was met in the street by homosexuals dressed up as nuns”; here is El Capitán, who waited for forty years before proposing to his dancing partner; Horacio Fortunato, a circus owner and entrepreneur, whose encounter with a languid foreign woman will force him to change his roguish ways even as he attempts to court her; Maurizia Rugieri, who abandons her husband and child for a young medical student, converting their life together into an opera of her own design; Nicholás Vidal, who “had always known that a woman would cost him his life” but never suspected that it would be the wife of Judge Hidalgo; Riad Halabí (whom readers will remember from Eva Luna), once again displaying his concern and wisdom for the people of Agua Santa; Marcia Lieberman, the wife of a European diplomat, whose brief affair with the President for Life of an unnamed Latin American country has startling rewards...
Love, vengeance, nostalgia, compassion, irony - Isabel Allende leaves no emotion untouched in these stories. Opulently imagined, stirringly told, they confirm once more her place as one of the world's leading writers
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East, as her peripatetic family followed her stepfather's diplomatic career. She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup. Afterwards Allende fled her home and settled in Venezuela with her husband, son and daughter. She now lives in the San Francisco area with her American husband and their respective extended families.
Isabel Allende took the literary world by storm with the publication of "The House of the Spirits", a novel which chronicled four generations of a Chilean family against the backdrop of Chile's brutal history. The Times of London heralded Allende as having "the rare ability to blend fantasy and legend with political fact and a well-plotted narrative to produce an enchanted world unlike anything else in contemporary fiction." The New York Times called the book "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America."
“The world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”, Isabel Allende is now synonymous with the spiritual universe ofLatin America. A writer who has invested so much fantasy and imagination to narrate and describe the inimitable beauty of a continent that still remains an indecipherable enigma to the Western civilization, she has enchanted a couple of generations of readers. “The House of the Spirits” (1982) is a pivotal literary work, a chronology of one of the most mesmerizing family epics that aesthetically fuses the political, the sentimental and the transcendental. Isabel Allende was awarded the most prestigious literary prize of Chile, her native country, - Chilean National Prize for Literature. With the 18 published novels translated into more than 30 languages, her talent has marked indelibly the artistic world of the past 30 years.
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