Daughter of Fortune (50 page)

“Was it him?” asked Tao Chi'en.

“I am free,” she replied, holding tightly to Tao's hand.

About the author

  
2
   
Life at a Glance

  
4
   
Isabel Allende on Destiny, Personal Tragedy, and Writing

About the book

  
8
   
A Conversation with Isabel Allende

Read on

11
   
Have You Read? More by Isabel Allende

Author photograph © Willam Gordon

“Asked how she begins a book, she replies, ‘With a first sentence that comes from the womb, not the mind.'”

ISABEL ALLENDE
was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, and raised in Chile. She fled Chile after the 1974 assassination of her uncle, President Salvador Allende. She worked in Venezuela from 1975 to 1984 and then moved to America. She now lives in California with her husband, Willie Gordon.

She has worked as a television presenter, journalist, playwright, and children's author. Her first book for adults, the acclaimed
House of the Spirits
, was published in Spanish in 1982 and was later translated into twenty-seven languages.

Isabel holds to a very methodical, some would say menacing, literary routine. She writes using a computer, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00
A
.
M
. to 7:00
P
.
M
. She sits in what she refers to as a “small cabin off my garden.” Her routine shuns music in favor of silence and includes at least one superstition: “I always start on January 8.” Asked how she begins a book, she replies, “With a first sentence that comes from the womb, not the mind.”

Her favorite reads include
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez,
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer,
La Lumière des Justes
by Henri Troyat,
The Aleph
by Jorge Luis Borges,
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
by Mario Vargas Llosa, and the poetry of Neruda.

She has written seven novels, among them
Portrait in Sepia
and
Daughter of Fortune
. She has also published a celebration of the senses entitled
Aphrodite. My Invented Country
is an account of her life in Chile. Her adventure trilogy for children—
City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon
, and
Forest of the Pygmies
—takes as its themes the environment and ecology.

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“The really important events in my life happened in spite of me. I had no control over them.”

“Life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.” Can you describe that noise, what it is, and what it means to you?

We have very busy lives—or we make them very busy. There is noise and activity everywhere. Few people know how to be still and find a quiet place inside themselves. From that place of silence and stillness the creative forces emerge. There we find faith, hope, strength, and wisdom. Since childhood, however, we are taught to
do
things. Our heads are full of noise. Silence and solitude scare most of us.

You often talk and write about destiny. What is destiny for you?

We are born with a set of cards and we have the freedom to play them the best we can, but we cannot change them. I was born female in the forties into a conservative Catholic family in Chile. I was born healthy. I had my shots as a child. I received love and a proper education. All that determines who I am. The really important events in my life happened in spite of me. I had no control over them: the fact that my father left the family when I was three; the 1973 military coup in Chile that forced me into exile; meeting my husband Willie; the success of my books; the death of my daughter; and so forth. That is destiny.

Just before your daughter Paula went into a coma she said, “I look everywhere for God but can't find him.” Do you, can you, have faith in God after such a tragedy?

Faith has nothing to do with being happy or not. Faith is a gift. Some people receive it and some don't. I imagine that a tragedy like losing a child is more bearable if you believe in God because you can imagine that your child is in heaven.

There is a lot of autobiographical writing in your books, but no actual autobiography. Do you imagine ever writing an autobiography?

Yes, I suppose that one day I will write another memoir. I think that my book
Paula
has a lot about me. It is a kind of personal memoir, is it not?

After finishing the Jaguar and Eagle trilogy you returned to writing adult fiction. Do you think you will write for children again? Do you have a favorite genre of writing as a reader or writer?

I don't know if I will write for kids again. It is not an easy genre. I feel more comfortable writing for adults. I love to write novels with strong plots and characters. I am not a minimalist writer! But as a reader I like many kinds of books, mainly literary fiction. I don't read romance novels or thrillers. They bore me.

Do you think that fiction has a moral purpose? Or can it simply be entertainment?

It can be just entertainment, but when fiction makes you think it is much more exciting. However, beware of authors who pound their “moral messages” into you.

You have written letters all your life, most notably a daily letter to your mother. You've also worked as a journalist. Which form or experience of writing helped you most when you started writing books?

The training of writing daily is very useful. As a journalist I learned to research, to be disciplined, to meet deadlines, to be precise and direct, and to keep in mind the reader and try to grab his or her attention from the very beginning.

Does writing each book change you?

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul. Why do I write only about certain themes and certain characters? Because they are part of my life, part of myself, they are aspects of me that I need to explore and understand.

You loved science fiction as an adolescent. Do you think it inspired your love of creating other worlds?

Science fiction reinforced the idea—planted by my grandmother—that the universe is very strange and complex. Everything is possible and we know very little. My mind and my heart are open to the mystery.

You always start writing on January 8, but when do you finish? How long does it take you to write your books?

I write approximately a book per year. It takes me three or four months to write the first draft, then I have to correct and edit. I write in Spanish, so I also have to work closely with my English translator Margaret Sayers Peden. And then I have to spend time on book tours, interviews, traveling, etc.

Do you have a favorite among your books?

I don't read my own books. As soon as I finish one I am already thinking of the next. I can hardly remember each book. I don't have a favorite but I am grateful to my first novel
The House of the Spirits
, which paved the way for all the others, and to
Paula
, because it saved me from depression.

You grew up in Chile but now live in the United States. Which country has had the most influence on your writing and why?

It is very easy for me to write about Chile. I don't have to think about it. The stories just flow. My roots are in Chile and most of my books have a Latin American flavor. However, I have lived in the United States for many years, I read mainly English fiction, I live in English, and certainly that influences my writing.

The United States was, to a Chilean, an enemy country in the seventies. How did you overcome that and learn to love it?

I know that most Americans are not responsible for the evil that their government has done or does today abroad. Most people in this country have good intentions. They think of themselves as decent citizens and moral human beings. They want to do good. But there is great ignorance and indifference. The United States has supported in other countries the kind of brutal tyranny that it would never tolerate in its own territory. If Americans were better aware of the atrocities that have been committed in their name and with their tax money they would be horrified.

Emigrants “lose their crutches” and their past is “erased.” Is that both positive and negative?

When one moves to another country as an immigrant one loses everything that is familiar. To survive one needs to draw strength from within and make double the effort of the locals to get half the results. I think that it is important to remember the past and be proud of one's roots.

“It was easy to become someone different in the upheaval of the Gold Rush. As an immigrant and as a writer, the idea of creating a new version of oneself is very appealing to me.”

The characters in
Daughter of Fortune
invent and reinvent identities to accommodate their changing situations. The protagonist pretends to be a deaf-mute Chinese boy at one point and the brother of her Chilean lover at another. There's also an English bon vivant pretending to be a missionary, an intimidating giant who calls himself Babalu the Bad but turns out to be Babalu the Good, and many others. What is all the pretending about?

The California Gold Rush was a strange and chaotic time. Men from all over the world traveled to that region for a very simple reason: greed. Yet many of them were also running away from their pasts, from religious or political persecution, or from the law. Many reinvented themselves. It was easy to become someone different in the upheaval of the Gold Rush. Nobody really cared who you were or from where you came. As an immigrant and as a writer, the idea of creating a new version of oneself is very appealing to me.

The story begins in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso, where apparently in the mid-1800s there was a large expatriate English community. Is there still a distinguishable English community?

The descendants of the British community in Chile are still there, although totally integrated with the local population. There are still some English clubs and schools but they are no longer exclusively for the British. My former husband's mother descended from a British family and although she never traveled abroad she felt that England was her home. The British influence in Chile was so strong that Chileans like to call themselves “the British of Latin America.”

Chileans, British, Chinese—you cover considerable ethnic ground here. To what extent do your personal interests—your desire to explore various cultures—determine your plot?