By Laura Moreno
Photos by: Marlene Vicente | Dreamstime.com – Fmua | Dreamstime.com – Toniflap | Dreamstime.com
Isabel Angelica Allende (born August 2, 1942), “the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author” is Basque-Portuguese-Chilean. Best known for The House of the Spirits (1982), Eva Luna (1988), Paula: A Memoir (1995), City of the Beasts (2002) about a magical journey to the Amazon River, and The Wind Knows My Name (2023) about Nazi occupied Vienna, and Daughter of Fortune (1998) about the Gold Rush.
She specializes in magical realism. Her novels are often centered on the lives of women, her own personal experience, and historical events. Isabel Allende, an LGBT ally, has published 24 books to date; most are available in over 42 languages. She has sold over 77 million copies worldwide.
Education & early career
Isabel Allende’s father and step-father were both diplomats, which is why she was born in Peru and lived in several countries as a child. In Bolivia, she attended an American school. In Beirut, she attended an English school and Shakespeare became her favorite author.
Before becoming a writer, Allende worked for the UN Food & Agriculture and later began writing for magazines. She served as editor of a children’s magazine and published two children’s stories: La Abuela Panchita based on her grandmother, and Lauchas y Lauchones.
Completely fluent in English, she also worked translating Barbara Cartland’s novels into Spanish, but was fired for changes she made to the novels, particularly their endings.
Politics
Before her first novel was published, Allende already had an eager worldwide audience. That’s because her family is very well-known.
Her uncle Salvador Allende, a Basque-Belgian-Jewish-Chilean, started out as a medical doctor who served the poor and thus came to understand the ravages of poverty on the human body. Although from an upper-class family, his practice transformed him into a fierce advocate for the poor. He was also an author, publishing his medical dissertation under the title “Crime & Mental Hygiene.” Soon he became a successful politician and eventually ascended to the presidency. On September 11, 1973, he died under disputed circumstances in his presidential office during a coup secretly perpetrated by Nixon & Kissinger. (By this time, Nixon was fast deteriorating into mental illness due to the Watergate Scandal.) The coup succeeded, and far-right puppet dictator General Augusto Pinochet was imposed on a country that had democratically elected its first democratic socialist to alleviate poverty by molding its government after Sweden’s.
In investigating numerous CIA abuses in 1975, the Church Committee (the US Senate select committee) was able to provide oversight and end some of the CIA’s crimes, at least for a time. The Church Committee (led by Sen. Frank Church) found that from 1963-1973 the CIA poured millions of the American people’s tax dollars into illegally sabotaging Chile’s elections to keep the moderate Leftist Allende (maligned as a “dangerous Communist”) out of power. $1.5 million went to a right-wing Chilean newspaper and other publications like Time Magazine to turn the public against Allende. But to no avail; Chile had a very strong democratic tradition. After Allende narrowly won in 1970, the CIA poured millions of dollars into preventing him from taking office through a series of crimes like trying to kidnap Chile’s Commander-in-Chief of the military; the scheme backfired terribly, causing the Commander’s death and cementing public opinion in Allende’s favor. After that, the CIA began pouring millions of dollars into sabotaging Chile’s economy by imposing an “invisible blockade” and even paying trucking unions to strike so that there would be no food on the shelves, which spurred inflation and chaos.
The CIA spent $10 million in 1972 alone on illegal activities intended to secretly foment a coup. But to this day, key information on White House involvement in the 1973 coup has been redacted from declassified files.
Today, Pinochet’s human rights crimes are still headline news. As evidence continues to come to light, it is being used to put the culprits into prison, some for life, like the pilots of airplanes utilized to “disappear” dissidents and their mothers (!) who gathered regularly to protest the disappearance of their sons and daughters (the Desaparecidos). Nuns who joined the protest were also disappeared and are now being avenged in the courts as well. Even when evidence has been scrubbed, the truth inevitably comes out as justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
At the time of the illegal coup, 31-year-old Isabel Allende’s step-father was ambassador to Argentina and she was working locally in television production. The future writer quickly arranged safe passage out of the country for people on “wanted lists.” But when her parents barely escaped an assassination attempt, she was put on the “wanted list”, and she started getting death threats of her own, they fled to Venezuela where they lived for 13 years.
Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda & the start of her literary career
Isabel Allende credits the great Chilean poet and Communist senator Pablo Neruda, the 1971 Nobel Laureate in literature, with helping her begin a literary career. When she asked him for an interview, he agreed, but told her she has too much imagination to be a journalist and should be a novelist instead. He recommended she publish her satirical columns as a book. The result was Civilice a Su Troglodita, her first published book. Next, El Embajador, a play she wrote was performed in Santiago a few months before the disruption of the 1973 coup.
In 2023 it was finally determined that Pablo Neruda, too, was ordered killed by Pinochet. Neruda went to the hospital after the coup and told others he strongly suspected a doctor had injected him with a lethal substance. He planned to quickly pack and immediately fly to Mexico, but died 5 hours later; this happened 12 days after the coup. Years later an investigation found no poisons could be detected in his body, but later high levels of the bacterium that can cause botulism poisoning were found, exactly the same as in deceased political prisoners.
On camera, Isabel Allende recalled participating in Neruda’s funeral procession through the streets amidst the political chaos. She stayed close to the Swedish ambassador in an effort to remain safe. But what she remembers most is the emotional impact of hearing a by-stander yell, “Pablo Neruda, presente! Salvador Allende, presente!” In the hearts of the people, Neruda’s funeral would have to serve as their president’s funeral as well. The president’s remains were hastily buried in an unmarked grave; he was not given a proper funeral until Pinochet stepped down in 1990.
Paula
Written as a grief-stricken letter to her deceased daughter Paula, Isabel Allende’s first memoir Paula (1995) records stories of her childhood and her years in exile.
In 1991, a hospital medical error in her daughter’s medication left Paula in a vegetative state. Allende spent months at her daughter’s bedside, then had her moved to California where she soon died in December 1992 at age 29.
The author started the Isabel Allende Foundation in honor of her daughter. Its mission is to support “programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children.”
A very strict writing routine
Allende takes her writing very seriously. She cancels everything on her schedule to produce her next book in her studio not far from her home. She works Monday – Saturday, 9:00 am – 7:00 pm approximately 6 months of the year – her writing season.
She always begins her writing on January 8th: “January 8, 1981, I was living in Venezuela and I received a phone call that my beloved grandfather was dying. I began a letter for him that later became my first novel, The House of The Spirits. It was such a lucky book from the very beginning, that I kept that lucky date to start.”
Allende says it was exile from Chile that made her a serious writer. “I don’t think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.”
Worldwide success
No doubt Isabel Allende is a literary legend, and one of the finest storytellers to put pen to paper. She undertakes her writing as a healing endeavor, writing her way out of the darkness. The topics are quite heavy and are not for everyone. She acknowledges that she has not always received good reviews, stating that Chilean intellectuals “detest” her.
This may be a bit of an overstatement. But it’s certainly true that commercial success can harm an author’s artistic ethos, as with Truman Capote who was (and maybe still is) considered too commercial and therefore never won a literary award despite being one of the very best writers ever, both style and substance.
Memorably, Isabel Allende was selected to represent Latin America as one of 8 flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy in 2006 walking right behind Sofia Loren. Other flag bearers were Manuela Di Centa, Nawal El Moutawakel, Susan Sarandon, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, Maria de Lurdes Mutola and Somaly Mam.
Among her many awards, Isabel Allende was received the American Book Award in 1989, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004, and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the US in 2014. Isabel Allende married an American and is now a US citizen. She lives north of San Francisco.
Note: the youngest daughter of former Chilean president Salvador Allende is also named (Maria) Isabel Allende. Until recently she served as President of the Senate in Chile, like her father.