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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Woodburn Public Library | Allende | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Jefferson Public Library | SPAN ALLENDE, I. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Allende, I. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | SP F ALLENDE | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An exotic dance that beguiles and entices... The enchanted and enchanting account of a contemporary Scheherazade, a wide-eyed American teller-of-tales who triumphs over harsh reality through the creative power of her own imagination...From the Paperback edition.
Author Notes
Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. When her parents separated, young Isabel moved with her mother to Chile, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She married at the age of 19 and had two children, Paula and Nicolas. Her uncle was Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. When he was overthrown in the coup of 1973, she fled Chile, moving to Caracas, Venezuela.
While living in Venezuela, Allende began writing her novels, many of them exploring the close family bonds between women. Her first novel, The House of the Spirits, has been translated into 27 languages, and was later made into a film. She then wrote Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, all set in Latin America. The Infinite Plan was her first novel to take place in the United States. She explores the issues of human rights and the plight of immigrants and refugees in her novel, In The Midst of Winter. In Paula, Allende wrote her memoirs in connection with her daughter's illness and death. She delved into the erotic connections between food and love in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses.
In addition to writing books, Allende has worked as a TV interviewer, magazine writer, school administrator, and a secretary at a U.N. office in Chile. She received the 1996 Harold Washington Literacy Award. She lives in California. Her title Maya's Notebook made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2013.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A woman makes love to an Indian dying of snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva``so she will love life.'' Thus begins Allende's latest novel, a magnificent successor to The House of the Spirits and Of Love & Shadows. Set in a Latin American country, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures. Brought up in the house of an eccentric doctor devoted to mummifying corpses, where her mother is a servant, Eva is left an orphan at six. Her black godmother, or madrina , leases her as a servant to a series of bizarre households of metaphorical significance, the last of which she leaves in grand style upon emptying a government Minister's chamberpot over his head. Interleaved with Eva's story is her account of a certain Rolf Carle, with whom her life will become linkedshe tells of his youth in Nazi Austria and young manhood as a filmmaker in South America. Through a series of improbable and felicitous coincidences, Eva is taken under the wing of such exotic benefactors as a street urchin who becomes a guerrilla leader, a colorful whorehouse Madam, a kindly Turkish merchant and a stunningly beautiful transsexual. Like the author, Eva is a prodigious fabulist, weaving extraordinary tales that change reality at will, making it, as she says, easier to bear. Although the fabulist's art is seen as dangerously escapist, Allende's wonderful novel, crammed with the strange and fantastical, the sensuous and the erotic, also speaks powerfully in the cause of freedom. 40,000 first printing; BOMC and QPBC alternate. (October) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country--with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first--and best--book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district--with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital--where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action--the mishaps of Eva--is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
An orphan girl makes her way through life charming everybody with her gift for story telling. A novel by the internationally acclaimed Chilean.
Choice Review
In her third and most disappointing novel, the Chilean writer Isabel Allende unabashedly serves up Latin America's social ills as titillation. "When I write," confesses Eva Luna's eponymous heroine, "I describe life as I would like it to be." So does her starry-eyed creator. Yet the fairy-tale version of Latin America that Allende here invents offers nothing but a barren cheerfulness. The narrator is a picaresque heroine whose adventures bring her in contact with every stereotype of grade-B Latin American fiction. The charismatic vagabond-turned-guerrilla leader, the Arab merchant, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the superstitious maid, the black madrina become, in the course of the book, a surrogate family for the orphaned Eva Luna. But the reader never cares much about Eva's travails; the book's frivolousness prevents the reader from taking its heroine seriously. Allende must have foreseen that critics would accuse her of superficiality, for she mines her romance with happy examples of frank artifice. One of the most admirable characters is a transexual who perfects the art of seeming what he is not. And Eva and her lover take refuge at the end of the book in a touristy Austrian-style village, complete with cuckoo clocks and wurst, plunked down in an America of jungles, oil reserves, and Indians. But even the many readers prepared to be delighted by artifice and not requiring every work of literature to do battle with social wrongs will find little new or imaginative in Eva Luna, except for the wonders of Margaret Sayers Peden's brilliant translation. For the sake of completeness, academic libraries should acquire the novel, but the general reader can afford to pass it by. -M. L. Friedman, Wake Forest University
Library Journal Review
Born in the back room of the mansion where her mother toils, and herself in service from an early age, the enchanting and ever-enchanted Eva Luna escapes oppression through story telling. Rolf Carle flees Germany for South America, and ultimately works as a documentary film maker, to escape childhood memories of burying the concentration camp dead. The two are brought together by guerrilla Huberto NaranjoEva's lover and a subject for Rolf's camerain this dense, opulent novel that serves as a metaphor for redemption through creative effort. In her earlier works ( The House of the Spirits, LJ 4/15/85; Of Love and Shadows, LJ 5/1/87), Allende's rich language occasionally shaded into overripeness; but here the prose is more tightly controlled, the characterizations defter. Her best work yet. BOMC alternate. Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.