Isabel Allende."It's time for Chile to go home to play Bingo"
“Although I do not live in Chile forty years, I have it under the skin and always reappears;I don't have a hard time rebuilding Chile to write -the Chilean writer resident in the United States Isabel Allende (1942) said Monday by presenting Violeta, her new novel-.However, Chile is never mentioned and I did it so that I can become a generic place and readers from other Latin American countries can identify ”.To write it, Allende was inspired by the story of his mother, Francisca Llona Barrios, and in the hundreds of letters and mails that he wrote to his daughter."I have the entire life of my mother, who died shortly before the Covid, in letters she wrote to me every day," said the author from her home in California, ".There was plenty of material to write a novel about my mother but, when I tried to write it, I understood that I was emotionally too close to the character.She was subject to her husband, my father [the diplomat Tomás Allende Pesce], and did not have that economic freedom that I always wanted for her ".As his mother, Violeta del Valle is daring, beautiful, intelligent and with a vision of the future but, unlike her, is independent."And there is no feminism without economic independence," said the writer, added that she had given her protagonist own experiences."I think all authors do that, they take out the material they use for stories from memory and personal experience.".
Violet (South American) passes between 1920 and 2020, between one pandemic and another, and tells the life of a passionate and intrepid woman who becomes a centenary.Its simultaneous launch in English and Spanish in the United States, Latin America and Spain on Tuesday represents an editorial event.The successful author, 79, could give her chair to her colleagues about the way of infecting enthusiasm and joy when presenting a fiction."I hope you like my book, I loved writing it," he said. Risueña y elegante, con ejemplares de Violeta de fondo, Allende respondió preguntas de la prensa y conversó con el director editorial de Plaza & Janés, el español David Trías, que recordó que en 2022 se cumplen cuarenta años de la publicación de uno de los best sellers de la escritora chilena, La casa de los espíritus.“All of us who have read it consider that it is a‘ novel ’ -said Trías about Violeta -.It contains the ingredients of Isabel's great novels: strong women, domination, power, freedom, love in their different meanings and the history of a century ”.He recalled that Allende is the most read Spanish author in the world.
From the Spanish influenza pandemic and the economic crisis of 1929 to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Operation Condor, through the world wars, emigration to the United States and feminism, the novel Entrectruza historical facts with the life of the character."My life is worthy of being told, not so much for my virtues and for my sins, many of whom you do not suspect," he writes violet at his beloved grandson Camilo, a Jesuit priest. ".Here I tell you.You will see that my life is a novel ".For this character, Allende was inspired by his friend, the Chilean priest, writer and activist Felipe Berríos del Solar.
The strength in the face of adversity, humor, eroticism and sensuality characterize Violeta and other female characters of the novel, such as Miss Taylor and Teresa Rivas."Power, ambition, greed move into the world, but what interests me most in my novels are human relationships, emotions, and of all of them, the most powerful is love, at least for women,"Said the author, who said she was very happy with her current partner, Roger Cukras, with whom she married two years ago;She also revealed that her husband had contributed key information about the actions of the mafia in Miami (an issue that her novel addresses)."I have nothing in common with him," he confessed, ".For the pandemic we were locked in a small house for two years in a long honeymoon, and it is working in the most ”.Coronavirus pandemia also served the author to "structure" the novel.
Allende stressed that the protagonist always assumes an active role in history, such as when he decides to create a foundation to help victims of gender violence."You have to continue challenging machismo and patriarchy," he said, ".Alone we are very vulnerable;together, invincible ".As a violet, the author is in charge of an institution that supports women, the Isabel Allende Foundation.“The mission of the Foundation is to invest in the power of women, and that is why we work with vulnerable women in different programs.I have always been feminist and I am delighted with what happens now, that there is a wave of young women who are doing extraordinary things.I have a lot of hope about the future and the only thing I regret is that I will not be alive to see the changes ”.
"Starting a book is like throwing yourself with a candle in a dark place, little by little you illuminate the corners and the story and the characters emerge," Allende observed on his literary method."I don't win anything with writing a script," he said, ".I learned to have confidence and flexibility for history to develop organically ”.He also said that every novel presents crossroads and that the characters must be consistent with the change."I don't want me to get a cartoon but a contradictory and complex being".
There was in the press conference references to the current situation of his native country, after the triumph of Gabriel Boric at the polls against the "ultra -cultural Kast's conservator", as he called the right -wing candidate.“A granddaughter of Salvador Allende, a young woman who grew up in Cuba, will be Minister of Defense and will have to understand the Armed Forces, and let's not forget the past of the armed forces in Chile," he pointed out, ".I am delighted with the Puerto Ric cabinet, it is very diverse and has a solid intention that there is gender parity.And the other is that they are all so young: it is a new generation that ascends to power.It's time for the old cacamanes to go home to play Bingo ”.
Asked by La Nacion, the author said about the situation of writers and journalists in some Latin American countries, such as Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba."There is repression for anyone who protests," replied the author, ".One of the first signals of authoritarianism is the repression of public opinion and that is achieved by the voices that ask and question and that are in the opposition ”.It also expanded on the culture of cancellation."Maybe the most sane would be for the story to be taught how it should be taught," he said..Not only the story that the winner tells, who in general is a white man, but with the voices of the defeated, of the poor, of women, of the people of color, those quiet voices must be brought to the history textsand to the narrative about the past ".
For Allende, the symbols of the past should not be eliminated, but to review the past.And he gave as an example the controversy that takes place in Chile about the writer Pablo Neruda, since it was denounced that I confess that I have lived, Neruda "confesses" a violation.“Neruda is the most important poet in Chile and one of the greatest in the history of poetry.One thing is the failed man, that we are all failed, and another thing is the work.Let's review his private life but let's not eliminate his work because then no one will remain, ”he concluded.
Thus was the protagonist of Isabel Allende's new novel
I came to the world on a storm Friday in 1920, the year of the plague.That afternoon of my birth had been cut the electricity, as it used to happen in the storms, and had turned on the candles and lamps of cheerosene, which they always kept by hand for those emergencies.María Gracia, my mother, felt the contractions, which she knew so well, because she had given birth to five children, and was abandoned to suffering, resigned to giving birth to another male with the help of her sisters, who had assisted her in that trance several times several timesAnd they were not obfuscated.The family doctor had been working tirelessly in one of the campaign hospitals for weeks and it seemed imprudence to call it for something as prosaic as a birth.On previous occasions they had had a midwife, always the same, but the woman had been one of the first victims of influenza and did not know another.
My mother estimated that she had spent her whole pregnant, freshly birth life or replenishing a spontaneous abortion.His eldest son, José Antonio, had turned seventeen, of that he was sure, because the year of one of our worst earthquakes was born, who threw half a country to the ground and left a balance of thousands of dead, but he did not remember exactly the ageof the other children or how many spoiled pregnancies had suffered.Each one incapacitated for months and each birth left her exhausted and melancholic for a long time.Before marrying, it had been the most beautiful debutant in the capital, spiky, with an unforgettable face of green eyes and translucent skin, but the excesses of motherhood had deformed the body and exhausted the mood the mood.
In theory, he loved his children, but in practice he preferred to keep them a comfortable distance, because the energy of that troop of boys produced a battle disturbance in his small female kingdom.On one occasion he admitted to his confessor that he was pointed out to give birth to men, as a devil's curse.He received the penance of praying a daily rosary for two full years and making a significant donation to repair the Church.Her husband prohibited her from confessing.
Under the supervision of my aunt Pilar, Torito, the boy used for all service, climbed a ladder and tied the ropes, which were stored in a closet for those occasions, in two steel hooks that he himself had installed in the ceiling.My mother, in a nightgown, kneel.My aunt pia, crouched between his legs, was ready to receive the newborn before he touched the ground.I had prepared the infusions of Ortiga, Artemis and Ruda and after delivery.The storm's clamor, which crashed into the blinds and started pieces of the roof, turned off the groans and the long final shout when I appeared my head first and immediately the body covered with mucus and blood, which slipped between the hands of my aunt andcrashed into the wooden floor.
