Paula

Isabel Allende 1994

Introduction

Paula, published in Spanish in 1994 and English in 1995, is the first nonfiction book by Isabel Allende, one of today's most influential Latin-American authors. An autobiography framed by the author's experience of watching her only daughter's slow death, the book is "equal parts heartbreak, humor and wisdom," as described by Cynthia Dockrell in her review for the Boston Globe. Allende wrote the book while her daughter Paula was in a coma from 1991 to 1992 and uses her writing to preserve memories as she teaches herself to let her daughter go. Like with her first, landmark novel, The House of the Spirits, Allende followed a personal tradition of letter-writing to begin Paula and did not think of the audience: "It was meant to become a journal that I would give to my children and my grandchildren," she said to Dockrell. The book that was never meant to be published became an instant bestseller in several countries.

Many reviewers have pointed out that Allende's first work of nonfiction reads like a novel—in fact, German and Dutch translations of Paula were subtitled "A Novel"—but the author differentiates between genres even in the book itself. When describing the evening she met her second husband, on a night of the full moon with Sinatra singing from the restaurant's speakers, Allende adds: "This is the kind of detail that is forbidden in literature … The problem with fiction is that it must seem credible, while reality seldom is." This time around, the reality behind the inspirations for many eccentric, mystical, larger-than-life characters and adventures in Allende's earlier works are revealed in her descriptions of actual people and events—proving that her fictional work often stems from the author's life itself.

Author Biography

Allende was born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru, the first child of affluent Chilean parents: her parents were Tomas, a diplomat and the nephew of future Chilean President Salvador Allende, and Francisca (Llona Barros) Allende. Following the couple's divorce three years later, the author's mother returned to her parents' home in Santiago where Allende grew up. In 1953, her mother married Ramon Huidobro, a Chilean diplomat who took his new family to his posts in Bolivia, Europe, and Lebanon over the next five years. Allende graduated from a private high school in Santiago, Chile, and shortly after married Miguel (Michael) Frias.

After working as a secretary for a couple of years, Allende began successful careers in the theatre and print and broadcast journalism. She also had two children. In 1970, Salvador Allende won the popular election and became president of Chile, only to die three years later in a right-wing military coup. Allende lost her job on political grounds and the family began receiving threats from supporters of the new regime; they fled Chile and sought asylum in Venezuela in 1975. During Allende's life in exile, her marriage fell apart; eventually, she remarried and now lives in California with her second husband.

While in exile, Allende began a letter to her grandfather that turned into her first novel, The House of the Spirits ; published in 1982, it quickly became a bestseller in several countries. Paula, published in 1995, is Allende's autobiography, contextualized by her daughter's death in 1992, a year after Paula fell into a coma due to a rare blood disease. As Allende states in an interview with Farhat Iftekharuddin for Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers:"I think that I am still in [the] tunnel of pain, but the fact that I finished the book has been like a catharsis in many ways. So, when I started writing [Paula], my only goal was to survive."

Recent novels include Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses (1998) and Daughter of Fortune (1999).

Summary

Part One: December 1991 to May 1992

Sitting by Paula's hospital bed in Madrid and waiting for any sign of improvement as her daughter lies in a coma caused by a rare blood disease, Allende begins to tell the story of her life with the purpose of offering her own past to her ill daughter. "Listen, Paula. I'm going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost."

Allende begins with her Chilean heritage and national history, her family tree, the controversial circumstances of her parents' marriage, and Allende's birth. Often switching between the vivid memories of the past and the silent waiting of the present by Paula's hospital bed, the narrator introduces a complex web of relatives that surrounded her during her childhood, after the scandalous divorce of her parents: her father abandoned the family after a political scandal at the Peruvian embassy, in which he might have been involved. Back in her maternal grandparents' home in Chile, little Allende forms strong and lasting bonds with family members and begins to develop a sense of liberal politics as she observes the lives of her family's servants. She also learns the art of storytelling from her spirit-summoning grandmother Meme and her grandfather Tata. After her mother's marriage to Chilean diplomat Tio Ramon, the family moves again, and Allende spends her teenage years in Lebanon. Because of the political unrest in the region during the 1950s, she is sent back to Santiago to finish school; there she meets her first husband Michael. They have two children, Paula and Nicolas.

Allende proceeds to write about her professional adventures, from her work for the United Nations to her work as a journalist. During the 1960s, Allende relates how she developed into a feminist liberal while traveling and greatly expanding her social life. When she attempts to interview poet Pablo Neruda, he advises her to use her creative talents to write fiction; advice she will eventually take. Further, the author recalls the victory of Salvador Allende in 1970, only to contrast it with the events three years later when the military coup under Augusto Pinochet fully disrupts the life she had in Chile. The first part of the book ends with the heavy atmosphere of a Chilean police state and terror that is yet to be fully comprehended.

Part Two: May to December 1992

In the second part of the book, as she learns of Paula's brain damage and the impossibility of her recovery, Allende abandons the letter format of her writing and proceeds to tell a story as an autobiography. While moving Paula to California, where she can take care of her in her home, the author begins to recall the years of her life after 1973, when her homeland changed forever.

Many people around Allende suffer under the Pinochet regime, and she and her family organize ways of helping those in need, always afraid of possible consequences. The author loses her job as a journalist for political reasons, and the family begins to feel the pressure of anonymous threats. In 1975, they flee Chile and seek asylum in Venezuela, where Allende experiences one of the worst periods of her life. With great difficulty, she finds a job as a school administrator, but the rest of her life seems to be falling apart. As her relationship with Michael begins to disintegrate, Allende looks for comfort in an affair that ultimately ends her marriage. Exasperated and depressed, the author begins to write to her dying grandfather (Tata) in Chile; the letter becomes a novel, The House of the Spirits. At this point, Allende explains the somewhat superstitious process she goes through in her work, the purpose of her writing, and the techniques she employs; she also recalls the connections between the real people and events in her life and the characters and adventures described in her fiction.

Allende's marriage seems beyond salvation, so she divorces her first husband in 1987; about a year later, she meets Willie and remarries, moving to California with him. Settling into her new life and new professional identity as a writer in America, Allende criticizes the role of the United States in Latin America. At the house she shares with Willie, she takes care of Paula and slowly accepts the inevitable. She lets her go with a final goodbye, and the book ends with Paula's departure into the world of spirits, exactly one year after she fell into a coma.

Key Figures

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende, narrator and protagonist, emerges as strong, imaginative, passionate, and loving but also impulsive, prone to mistakes, and, at times, guilt ridden. In the year of silence and sadness at her daughter's bedside, she struggles against Paula's death the best way a storyteller can—by capturing memories. Allende survives exile in Venezuela for the sake of her children; she survives her marriage by finding a creative outlet in a letter to her grandfather—which turns into her first novel. She uses writing again to cope with her daughter's coma and death. Allende comes through as a survivor in spirit and finds love with her second husband. Throughout the book, she demonstrates an energetic spirit as the main caregiver for her daughter during her illness and finds strength in her love for her daughter in the moment of Paula's death.

Juan Allende

Plagued with illness from the moment of his birth, Juan is the narrator's weak, but likeable, youngest brother. As an adolescent, he joins the National Air Academy only to learn that he detests military life. Always considered the intellectual genius of the family, Juan becomes a professor of political science but turns to divinity studies when he experiences a spiritual crisis.

Pancho Allende

Pancho is the narrator's brother, their parents' second child, and a troublemaker from his teenage years on. Allende recalls his tendency to vanish for months and years at a time to go on daring spiritual quests. As an adult, he is estranged from his family.

Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende, the founder of Chile's Socialist Party and the world's first freely elected Marxist president, is the uncle of the narrator's father, Tomas. Although the narrator's familial relation to Salvador Allende ends with the divorce of her parents, the influential "uncle" continues a cordial relationship with the family. He is described as a loyal friend, sharp and energetic, arrogant and charming, and with a witty sense of humor. Allende writes that in her view, his main traits were "integrity, intuition, courage, and charisma." During the three years of his presidency (1970-1973), Chile is divided by fear and harsh, unchanging economic conditions. In 1973, the president's political enemies, headed by General Augusto Pinochet, take over the country in a violent military coup during which Salvador Allende allegedly commits suicide.

Tomas Allende

Tomas, the narrator's estranged father, disappears from her life too early for personal memories. Allende describes him as a "clever man with a quick mind and merciless tongue … [and] a murky past," whose lineage (he is the cousin of Salvador Allende) granted him certain political standing. After the wedding, Tomas takes his bride to Peru where he is appointed secretary of the Chilean embassy. Their three children, the narrator being the oldest, are born in Lima. Tomas' career and marriage come to an abrupt end with the scandalous news of sexual perversions involving an important politician. Allende never encounters him again until, ironically, she is called in to identify his body.

Ernesto

Ernesto, Paula's husband, is an electronics engineer in Madrid. Allende writes that, the day after Paula met him, she called to tell her mother she'd found the man she was going to marry. Allende describes her son-in-law as a sensitive, tender, emotional, yet strong and exuberant young man, very supportive of his wife. The couple lives in Madrid until Paula's illness; she falls into a coma before their first wedding anniversary. Allende describes the details of the young husband's suffering, noticing that even the nurses at the hospital feel envious—"[they] wish they could be loved like that."

Fisherman

The fisherman in Allende's story is a part of her memory of her first secret sexual experience at the age of eight and of the moral crisis that ensued.

Celia Frias

Celia is Allende's daughter-in-law, another example of the many radical conversions in the family: strictly religious and highly prejudiced at the time of her marriage to Allende's son Nicolas, Celia becomes a free spirit in time, eventually giving birth at the home of her mother-in-law.

Media Adaptations

• Channel BBC1 in the United Kingdom did a production of Listen Paula in September of 1995. The special, focusing on Allende, Paula, and the family's history, received much public attention.

Michael Frias

Michael is the narrator's first husband and the father of her three children; they meet in Santiago and marry young, after three years of chaste courtship. Michael is a member of an English family, which has lived in Chile for generations but maintains British mannerisms: he grows up treated like a "young lord," taught to control and conceal his emotions. Although a patient and supportive husband, he becomes distant and emotionally estranged from the narrator, especially during the second half of their marriage, which is spent in exile. During that time, he works on a dam deep in the Venezuelan jungle and visits his family every six weeks. Allende has an affair with an Argentinian musician with whom she spends three months in Spain, but she cannot stay away from her children and comes back. Despite many attempts to remedy their marriage, the two eventually divorce.

Nicolas Frias

Allende's son Nicolas is described as an imaginative albeit morbid teenager who tortures his mother with pretend suicides; eventually, he becomes an explorer-turned-computer expert. Nicolas is also very close to his sister and a great pillar of support for the narrator during Paula's illness.

Paula Frias

The author's daughter gives her name to this autobiography, as her tragic illness inspires Allende to write the book while taking care of her. Paula is the narrator's first child and only daughter; born in 1963, she grows up during her mother's professional rise in Chilean television. While her parents are at work and engaged in a lively social scene of 1960s Chile, Paula becomes "a complete lady in miniature" by the age of two in the hands of her paternal grandparents. Paula is spoiled yet mature, stubborn yet a quiet accomplice in acts of kindness—like hiding her grandmother's drinking habit by burying the empty bottles in the yard. Paula's idyllic childhood comes to an abrupt end when the family flees to Venezuela. There, Paula does volunteer work in the slums of Caracas, just as she helped classmates in post-coup Chile whose parents were persecuted by the new government.

After graduation, Paula marries Ernesto and moves to Spain with him; in a moment of clairvoyance, she writes a letter to be opened after her death, in which she bids everybody farewell. At the beginning of the book, she has just been confined to a hospital in Madrid, Spain, diagnosed with porphyria, a rare metabolic disease of the blood. Paula falls into a coma from which she never wakes up, and she dies exactly a year later.

Granny

Allende's first mother-in-law and Paula's paternal grandmother, Granny is a sensitive and loving English lady, who adores her grandchildren and spends the last years of her life taking care of them. With the social deterioration in Chile, she becomes depressed and turns to alcohol; after her grandchildren leave to seek exile in Venezuela, she loses touch with reality, repeatedly asks for them, and gradually dies—of alcoholism and loneliness.

Meme

The author has few memories of Meme, her maternal grandmother and Tata's wife who passes away early in the narrator's childhood, but her spirit seems to follow Allende throughout her life. Ethereal and mystical, the grandmother is a comforting presence and an essential part of the narrator's inspiration. Meme was training her granddaughter to become a seer but died before Allende developed her mystical gifts; with her death, the household became quiet and cheerless.

Mother

Brought up in a sheltering world of wealth and privilege, Allende's mother faces a life of disgrace after her divorce and suffers a long illness. Her health improves but her social status worsens when she falls in love with a married Chilean diplomat, Tio Ramon, whom she eventually marries. In the beginning of her second marriage, while the family lives in Lebanon, Allende's mother becomes an "expert in the supreme art of keeping up appearances" due to the family's modest income. Although often weakened by illness and stress, the narrator's mother remains a pillar of strength and encouragement in her life. When Allende returns to Chile, the two maintain a rich daily correspondence and visit each other at times of crisis.

Pablo Neruda

Probably Chile's most famous poet, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Pablo Neruda is a great influence in the narrator's writing career. During her job as a reporter, Allende visits him for lunch, hoping to get an interview; however, the poet laughs at the idea, calling her the country's worst journalist—lacking in objectivity, placing herself in the middle of all her stories, inventing and falsifying news. He finally gives her advice that will ultimately change her life: "Why don't you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are virtues."

General Prats

One of Salvador Allende's most loyal supporters, Prats dies with the defeat of his government in the military coup; however, the narrator salutes his ghost, which allegedly haunts the presidential palace during Pinochet's reign to remind its occupants of the terror they have imposed on the country.

Tio Ramon

Tio Ramon is Allende's stepfather, who enters her life shortly after her parents' separation. Entirely smitten by the beauty and vulnerability of the narrator's mother, he divorces his wife (with whom he has four children) and begins a life filled with financial struggles but entirely fulfilling. A diplomat assigned to various Chilean embassies, Tio Ramon takes his new family along and successfully weathers the many trials of raising another man's children. When Salvador Allende becomes president, Ramon gets a high and well-paid post in Argentina, only to leave after the coup; in his old age and in exile, he looks for work in Venezuela. Intelligent and charming, never uttering a word of complaint, he sets an example of courage and optimism that follows the narrator through her life's struggles.

Even though at their first meeting Allende declares she has "never seen such an ugly man" and becomes jealous of her mother's attention given to this stranger, she eventually develops a deep respect and love for her new father, whose vivacity and fairy-tale imagination make the years of modest living feel like they are filled with splendor. Although tough and persistent in making the narrator face her insecurities, Tio Ramon is also disarmingly supportive of her: when his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter doesn't want to go to a dance at her school in Lebanon out of fear of being the wallflower, he "closed the consulate and dedicated the afternoon to teach [her] to dance."

Tata

Tata is Allende's grandfather. As a young man, he is described as exhibiting "the concentration and integrity that were his characteristics; he was made of the same hard stone as his ancestors and, like many of them, had his feet firmly on the ground." Nevertheless, he marries his absolute opposite, a beautiful clairvoyant with telekinetic powers. In his old age, Tata remains a stubborn and proud man "who [believes] discomfort was healthful and that central heating sapped the strength." When he develops a heavy cough and high fever, he drives himself into a stroke with self-imposed remedies: "He buckled a saddle cinch around his waist and when he had a coughing fit gave himself a brutal tug to 'subdue his lungs"' and "tried to cure [the fever] with ice cold showers and large glasses of gin."

Allende acknowledges Tata's influence in her development as a writer as she recalls the long conversations she had with him, stating: "My daily visits with Tata provided me with enough material for all the books I have written, possibly for all I will ever write." She describes him as a "virtuoso storyteller, gifted with perfidious humor, able to recount the most hair-raising stories while bellowing with laughter." While in exile, Allende hears that Tata is dying and begins to write him a letter—which becomes a best-selling novel.

Willie

Willie is the narrator's second husband, a California lawyer with an aristocratic appearance and a frustratingly messy household life. The two meet after both of their lives have suffered a shipwreck of sorts, and they marry shortly thereafter. Allende falls in love with his life story and uses it in one of her novels.

Themes

Humor

Although Paula arises from an emotionally difficult time in the author's life and is permeated with her pain at losing her child to a long and excruciating illness, the writing is more often than not colored with Allende's wry sense of humor. For example, in describing the painful separation and social disgrace of losing her father after Tomas abandons his family, Allende recalls that her mother gladly returned to him his coat of arms, which featured three starving dogs—an ironic reference to the blue blood that Tomas brought to the family, then took away. As she writes of the sad days of her exile, the narrator also infuses her recollections with humorous remarks: she points out the loudness and vivacity of the Venezuelans, stating that, compared to them, "discreet Chileans with their high-pitched voices and delicate Spanish seemed like dolls on the wedding cake."

A crucial element of much of Allende's fiction, humor serves a double role in Paula. It emphasizes the magnitude of the narrator's pain through contrast: after entertaining anecdotes, Allende switches back into the reality of waiting, silence, and suffering in her daughter's inanimate presence. It also testifies to Allende's ability to find beauty, life, and strength in the face of tragedy, thus becoming a document of survival. Even while she writes about Paula's days in the hospital, the narrator notices the humor in the patients around her—like in the woman awaiting brain surgery who blames her condition on her husband's impotence. Allende's use of humor speaks of her personal ways of coping with pain and serves to balance out the emotional impact of the book, offering hope amid times of sadness.

Memory

In works that fall within the genre of autobiography, such as Paula, the author's memories are the essential component of the text. However, Allende arranges hers within the framework of the present, always reverting to her time with her daughter—the intended audience and the reason for telling the story of her life. The narrator's memories involve the recollections of others, as when she writes about the events that took place before her birth or in her early childhood; also, Allende acknowledges the changing nature of memory with aging and time, saying that people often make up in imagination for what they lack in memory of important participants in their lives. In describing her grandmother Meme, Allende says: "I heard people talk about her, and I hoard her few remaining relics in a tin box. All the rest I have invented, because we all need a grandmother." However, because she is telling the story to her daughter, Allende writes that she is trying to be as faithful as possible to what really happened.

The author further explains the personal significance of memory in her life as she recalls that her family members who passed away were preserved as alive in survivors' memories of them. Allende's grandfather, Tata, maintains his relationship with his wife through memories: "'She lives on,' he said, 'because I have never forgotten her, not for a single minute."' Faced with Paula's slow death, the narrator examines the importance of memory for the connection with one's loved ones when they pass on to spiritual existence; she writes that, once gone from the material world, they remain present only as spirits and memories, living intangible lives within those left behind.

Topics for Further Study

• The hereditary blood disease, porphyria, has its own rich mythological background. Investigate both the fiction and the facts about this rare illness. Discuss the reality and mythology of the disease in terms of the depiction of Paula as a character in the book.
• Select a few culturally specific narratives that negotiate a period of historical trauma. Such narratives might arise out of wars, like the Vietnam War or the Korean Conflict, or genocide, such as the Holocaust or the Indian Wars in the American West. How do narratives reveal variations in the representation of trauma based on their purpose (e.g. historical works, sociological studies, and fictional accounts)?
• The interest amongst Americans in their genealogy exploded during the 1990s. Investigate this recent interest in terms of best-selling works, like Allende's, that emphasize family trees.
• Although Paula reflects the author's Chilean heritage, in what ways does her work also take part in the creation of an international literature? How does Allende continue the spirit of "El Boom"?
• What is Marxism and why has it receded as a viable alternative to capitalism? What was so unique about the experience of Marxism in Chile compared to other attempts to create a socialist state?

Family

Amidst the narrator's recollections of personal growth, historical events, and cultural changes witnessed in her past are the detailed descriptions of the members of her family tree, with special emphasis on those who shaped her life and personality. Allende emphasizes the importance of family in her life over and over again, examining her own genetic and social heritage through the portraits of those that preceded her. When she describes the way her mother and grandmother "kidnapped" her from the hospital after she was born, Allende writes: "It is possible that in their haste they traded me for another baby, and that somewhere there is a woman with spinach-colored eyes and a gift for clairvoyance who is taking my place." However, the family relations created after her birth prove to be more important to Allende; based on the relationships she forms with various family members, she develops not only a large part of her personality but also her identity as a storyteller. Family also forms a basis for her sense of cultural identity, as she recalls the views and actions of those who have influenced her in determining her world views.

The situation of Paula's illness is also crucial for the author's sense of family, as she loses a part of her own. Allende writes: "Since the day [my children] were born, I have never thought of myself as an individual but as part of an inseparable trio." Given the sad occasion of Paula's dying, the family becomes closer and more significant for everybody involved, as is illustrated in the book's final pages when the family members gather to bid Paula goodbye.

Style

Autobiography

The genre of Paula is apparent in several elements of the book's construction. First of all, it is written in first person narrative, which the author specifies is her own voice; she names herself clearly in the text as Isabel Allende, not a character with the same name. Then, the foreword situates the work in relation to actual events in the author's life: Allende opens the book by stating, "These pages were written during the interminable hours spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital… as well as beside [Paula's] bed in our home in California." Throughout the rest of the book, specific references are made within this time frame: the first part is written during the stay in the Madrid hospital; the second part continues in the author's house and ends with Paula's death. Allende further specifies the nature of her writing in Paula when she states that she will try to tell the truth about her life without embellishing the facts.

Style

Many critics have noted that Paula resembles Allende's fictional works because the real characters, situations, and events from her life are described in the same style as her fictional ones. Style, defined as a specific way of using elements of writing composition to convey ideas and to give the text a stamp of the author's personality, is an indication of Allende's presence in all of her works. In Paula, when the narrator speaks of her identity as a writer, she admits to creating her novels and short stories on the basis of real-life encounters. For example, Allende focuses on family and culture as important topics covered in Paula, and there are detailed descriptions of individual characters as well as historical events. Also, the realistic presentation of facts is diluted by the author's references to ethereal, mystical visions and events; this is a technique that classifies Allende as a writer in the tradition of magic realism—a genre of modern Latin American novels that addresses social issues but keeps them veiled in "magical" symbolism.

Flashback

Allende creates a parallel plot in Paula by switching between two story lines: one in the present, in which she takes care of her daughter in her illness, and the other in the past, presented more or less in a linear fashion, in which the narrator tells the story of her life. The second story line is a flashback, a device used in literature to showcase events that took place before the story's beginning. Allende goes back and forth in her memory although she mostly maintains chronological order in the flashback, starting with a broad and unspecified description of her ancestry and going through the various stages of her life until the present time.

The benefit of using a flashback to tell a story is that the narrator knows what eventually happens; therefore, and especially since Paula is an autobiographical work, the author often comments on the future events in her story line while contextualizing a character or discussing an event. This way, Allende reorganizes the book to accommodate the development of certain themes: she groups them together by shifting the chronological order of her memories somewhat. For example, when talking about her estranged father at the book's beginning, Allende points out the irony of being called in to identify his body years later because she never knew what he looked like; she tells Paula all of his photographs were burned decades ago. This reference makes a link between the narrator's present, in which she tells Paula about a family photo from her childhood, and her past, in which the flashback continues with a description of the problematic marriage of Allende's parents.

Historical Context

NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1, 1994. This trilateral agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico created an economic zone free from tariff barriers. During the period of negotiations, the countries of the American Hemisphere left out of the agreement began to create their own trading blocks or to improve existing ones. In December 1994, the Summit of the Americas was held in Miami, Florida. All the nations of the hemisphere were present, and trade was high on the agenda. The dream of a hemisphere trading block was resuscitated, but nothing was immediately agreed upon due to the myriad of existing blocks that would need to be aligned.

For example, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay had, in 1990, formed Mercosur (a Spanish acronym that, in English, translates as the Common Market but is sometimes referred to as the Andean Group). However, the economies involved in this trading block did not begin to boom until 1992 when nearly every regional tariff between the member nations was removed. The 1992 agreement was in response to the NAFTA negotiations as well as the desire by individual countries, especially Chile, to eventually win inclusion into NAFTA. By 1997, Chile was approaching fast-track inclusion in NAFTA.

Chile

Chile's return to democracy began in 1987 when Pope John Paul II visited Chile and accused General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte's regime of human rights violations. In the political fracas that ensued, Pinochet agreed to a confidence plebiscite, a vote in which the people would decide whether to allow Pinochet to reign as president for another eight years. Sixteen of the opposition parties banded together to form a "No" coalition, and in the fall of 1988 Pinochet lost the plebiscite. Consequently, new elections were held the following year. In 1990, the Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, who represented the seventeen-party coalition Concert of Parties for Democracy, became president. Pinochet became "Senator for Life."

Aylwin succeeded in maintaining civilian rule by continuing to decrease the power of the military. His ability to avoid an overthrow of the government was successful. During the Aylwin administration, the Rettig Commission began to collect information on the human rights violations committed by the Pinochet regime. In the 1993 elections, democracy was assured with the election of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle.

America's Republican Revolution

Responding to a potential ideological vacuum, left by the Cold War's end, to President Clinton, and to the demographic shift in America, which had made the suburbs an electoral power in their own right, the Republicans took a commanding control of Congress in 1994 under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. This takeover has been called the Suburban Congress, the Republican Revolution, or the Newtonian Revolution. The extreme rhetoric of the revolutionary Gingrich eventually led to his political demise but not before seriously heightening the drama of the culture wars by reducing the National Endowment for the Arts and changing the structure of the welfare system.

Assisted Suicide

The "right to die" became a serious debate in the United States in response to a Michigan pathologist who became known as Dr. Death. By 1996, Jack Kevorkian had enabled thirty people to use his "suicide machines" to end their lives. Several states pursued murder charges against Kevorkian but three such cases failed. Several states put the issue to referendum votes.

Critical Overview

The critical reception of Paula was divided: although most reviewers praise the book as a passionate and candid voyage through memory and grief, some find it disappointing after Allende's previous work. Negative reviews range from criticism of the author's use of her daughter's tragedy as a peg on which to hang the story of her own life to seeing the book as an overly romanticized autobiography relying on questionable facts, to pointing out that the author's kitschy rhetoric camouflages the book's introspective parts. However, the majority of critics applauded Allende's effort in her first nonfiction work and admitted to feeling drawn into the story's powerful emotional pull.

In a review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Patricia Holt praises the book and writes: "In her feverish determination to bring it all to life, and Paula along with it, Allende produces some of her best writing." Her writing, Holt says, is "voluptuous" and universally moving, as she seeks "answers to life's largest questions" in wondering about loss, death, revival, and acceptance. Liz Warwick writes in a Montreal Gazette review that Paula is "a haunting memoir of [Allende's] life and a poignant meditation on her daughter's year-long descent into death." Warwick also recognizes the honesty with which Allende reveals the many layers of her personal and public personae, including the one of writer, while remaining humble throughout. As Allende states in the interview with Warwick:

Mothers across the world for millennia have experienced the loss of their children. Why should I, in my terrible arrogance, imagine that I don't deserve this or that my daughter didn't deserve to die young? This is what life is about—coming into the world to lose everything we have … And from each loss, we learn and grow.

In the introduction to Conversations with Isabel Allende, John Rodden recognizes the stages in Allende's work as indivisible from her personal life and notes that Paula is a testimony to the author's individual development, saying: "Allende's courage and openness have also extended to a greater capacity for self-disclosure about her private demons." Rodden also points out the author's personal investment in the book, made remarkable by her willingness to share the experience with an audience of her readers. He further observes, in "After Paula," another chapter of the same book, that the magic in Paula, criticized for its presence in an autobiography, is in fact strangely existent in her life: a psychic once told Allende that her daughter would become known all over the world, which "was to come ironically true in another way: by the end of April 1995, Paula was number eight on the New York Times best-seller list, after having already become a best-seller throughout Europe."

Criticism

Jeremy W. Hubbell

Hubbell is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In this essay, he examines the literary expression of traumatic symptoms and the author's coping strategies in Allende's Paula , evident in the content as well as in the textual elements of the book.

During the 1990s, the concept of trauma entered the American cultural spotlight and found its place in the spheres of "psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology, and even literature," as Cathy Caruth writes in the book Trauma and Experience: Explorations in Memory. The public interest in the literature of this issue became apparent when autobiographical works focusing on a traumatic experience, such as Angela's Ashes, My Sergei: A Love Story, and Tuesdays with Morrie, reached and stayed on national bestseller charts throughout the decade.

The symptoms of trauma, as outlined by Caruth, are the following: intense personal suffering, avoidance or delay in emotional response that is too overwhelming to be experienced all at once, repetition and reliving of the experience in an attempt to recapture it, and the sufferer's becoming possessed by the overwhelming event. Underlying these symptoms is the sufferer's sense of fragmentation, disorientation in space and time, an apparently irrational desire to hang onto the trauma as a definition of self, and, if it is a trauma of loss, to retain a kind of memorial to the deceased within oneself. In her autobiography dedicated to her daughter, Allende finds an outlet for at least some of her traumatic symptoms by recording them in her writing and in the process creates a document that testifies to her pain and survival.

Allende exhibits several traumatic symptoms as she writes Paula ; the two story line threads (of the narrator's past and of her daughter's present) reflect the return of old traumas from her life. The most obvious traumatic event—the one that propels her into writing the book in the first place—is Paula's sudden tragic illness and the deterioration of her condition while she is in a coma. Allende's response of beginning a letter to her daughter can be seen as a form of avoidance of pain; in the beginning of the book, as she introduces the agonizing circumstances of her writing, she states: "I plunge into these pages in an irrational attempt to overcome my terror."

Allende's choice of the book's content also speaks of her need to escape the painful present as she reverts to memory and returns to the past—far from Paula's imminent tragedy. By writing of her own past, not exclusively Paula's, Allende signifies her desire to find self-affirmation outside her suffering as well as to remove herself from the source of unbearable pain. This attempt repeatedly fails because the author cannot help but return to the inanimate figure in the hospital bed. Allende speaks of her fear that Paula will not wake up intact from her coma, of guilt at placing her in a hospital where she was misdiagnosed and mistreated, of struggling not to lose hope in face of the doctors' grim predictions, of not being able to survive the loss; she speaks of these emotions in temporally distributed intervals, placing enough textual distance between them to make them manageable. Thus, the structure of the book demonstrates the author's way of coping with the trauma of Paula's illness. Further, the author documents a typical defense mechanism of trauma victims who are too overwhelmed by the event to face its horror in reality: she describes several dreams in which her worst fears are expressed, thus finding an outlet for her feelings in nightmares. The most disturbing dream is one in which she sees her daughter's death and cannot prevent it:

I dreamed that you were twelve years old, Paula … You were standing in the center of a hollow tower, something like a grain silo filled with hundreds of fluttering doves. Meme's voice was saying, 'Paula is dead.' You began to rise off the ground … I tried to hold you back by your clothing; I called to you, but no sound came.

An important way in which the text reflects Allende's traumatization is the juxtaposition of past and present events: when she accepts the news of Paula's brain damage and loses hope for her full recovery, the author also reaches the peak of pain in the story of her life—her unwanted exile in Venezuela after the assassination of her uncle, Chilean president Salvador Allende. This mirroring of an old trauma with a new one shows a repeating pain in the author's life, in both cases caused by unwanted abandonment, first of her country (which at the time did not have a chance of "recovery"), then of her hope for Paula's physical and mental recovery from her illness. Other losses come into the story as well: that of Meme and Tata (grandparents who die years apart, leaving both emptiness and fulfillment in the author's heart), of her own father who deserts the family before she can ever remember him, of her favorite uncle, of her brothers who become estranged, of her first marriage, which disintegrates while in exile, and so forth. These painful experiences range from personal to national, showing that trauma as a phenomenon exists and shapes not only individual lives but the lives of cultures, histories, and societies as well. When the doctors test Paula's peripheral nerves by administering electric shocks to her arms and legs, Allende is "thinking of all the men and women and children in Chile who were tortured in a very similar way with electric prods."

Allende's recollections of these various traumatic events serve a twofold purpose in the text. First, they reveal what the author has already survived and how she and those around her dealt with these losses; and second, they document her attempt to survive the tragedy at hand, perhaps by remembering the coping strategies she used in the past. Admittedly, the most powerful strategy for Allende is writing; at the beginning of the book, she says to Paula that her first novel (The House of the Spirits) began as a letter to her dying grandfather in an effort to deal with the pain she felt about his death and her own life in exile. Writing can be an effective way to relive the traumatic experience without being overwhelmed by it. In fact, Allende relates the accumulation of her life's traumas to her need to organize her memories so that she can deal with Paula's situation. Trying to fight off the sufferer's disorientation in time, she writes: "I am trampled by memories, all happening in one instant, as if my entire life were a single, unfathomable image." The text further reveals the traumatic nature of Allende's memory in its uncontrollability: "My past has little meaning; I can see no order in it, no clarity, purpose, or path, only a blind journey guided by instincts and detours caused by events beyond my control." Yet, writing has the benefit of giving trauma shape and some unity and of taking it from the abstract realm of one's mind into the concrete realm of text:

Looking back, I view the totality of my fate and, with a little luck, I shall find meaning for the person I am … My grandmother wrote in her notebooks to safeguard the fleeting fragments of the days and outwit loss of memory. I am trying to distract death."

What Do I Read Next?

• Allende's Daughter of Fortune, published in 1999, is the author's sixth novel. Set in the 1800s, it tells the story of a young woman who takes the road less traveled in pursuit of her own identity and happiness. Like Allende's former fictional works, this one also presents characters that span many generations, plots that converge, and questions issues of class and ethnicity.
• Angela's Ashes: A Memoir is Frank McCourt's 1996 book, which quickly became a bestseller; it was eventually followed by 'Tis, a sequel to his autobiography. McCourt recalls his childhood and life in Ireland and New York City, painting a poignant yet often humorous picture of a life of poverty, spent among many siblings and with an alcoholic father.
• Richard Wright's semi-fictional autobiography Black Boy, originally published in 1945, came out in a new edition in the 1990s. A moving story of a young boy's coming of age, this book is a seminal text in American history about the experience of black men in the American South during the Jim Crow years.
• Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson, published in 1997, is journalist Mitch Albom's recollection of the relationship he had with his mentor, Morrie Schwartz, before his mentor's death from a terminal illness.
• Ekaterina Gordeeva's 1996 book My Sergei: A Love Story is an autobiographical account by the young widow after her husband's untimely death. The book details the professional and intimate relationship between the author and her husband/skating partner Sergei Grinkov, the famous Russian two-time Olympic gold medalists in pairs skating.

Another symptom of trauma apparent in Allende's writing of Paula is a sense of fragmentation she repeatedly describes. For example, when her husband Willie visits her in Madrid, the author experiences her physical existence once again and reaffirms herself: she touches parts of her body and rediscovers life in it. Putting these parts together is a process that Allende employs in writing the book itself—taking pieces of her past, segments of memory, and putting them together into an autobiography. That way, she can once again find stability in a life ruptured by sadness. After months of feeling overwhelmed by Paula's tragedy, the author attempts to reestablish a sense of self outside the trauma that has come to define her everyday existence: "This is me, I'm a woman, I'm Isabel, I'm not turning into smoke, I have not disappeared."

The fact that Allende wrote an autobiography at this point in her life can be seen as an effort to negotiate the importance of the traumatic event as well as to let go of it. In preserving her feelings of loss and desperation in text, Allende manages to retain the event—in a way, "saving" the trauma on paper—and thus acknowledges the significance of losing Paula from her life. However, because the author writes about her life's experiences in the book, she also recognizes and reestablishes herself through the cycle of life that keeps her going. The fact that the book about the mother's life is dedicated to her dying daughter is a recovery that works in two ways: although she has created a tangible memorial to Paula, Allende has also contextualized the event as a part of her existence instead of the other way around. By the book's end, it becomes obvious that the author has learned to negotiate with her feelings and that she is ready to let Paula go into the spiritual realm that encompasses all existence: "I am the void, I am everything that exists, I am in every leaf of the forest, in every drop of the dew, in every particle of ash carried by the stream, I am Paula and I am also Isabel, I am nothing and all other things in this life and other lives, immortal. Godspeed, Paula, woman. Welcome, Paula, spirit."

Overall, Allende's autobiography is an ultimate testimony to survival after a tragic loss. The style and structure of Paula ultimately reveal the writer's state of mind although many other textual elements counter her record of her suffering. The book's humorous and buoyant tone, picturesque descriptions, magical depictions of everyday reality, and a cast of life-affirming personae are nevertheless delicately balanced against the author's painful attempts to deal with trauma in her life as well as in her literary work. An exemplary document of private as well as public trauma, Paula is a case study of the presence of an author's emotion in literature.

Source:

Jeremy W. Hubbell, Critical Essay on Paula, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Barbara Mujica

In the following interview-essay, Allende discusses with Mujica her writing technique, criticism of her works, and the uniqueness of Paula.

The night before this interview I attended a talk by Isabel Allende at Georgetown University—a stop on a long publicity tour for her memoir, Paula (HarperCollins). Allende spoke about her book, which she began in 1991 in a hospital in Madrid, where her daughter was being treated for porphyria. A beautiful, intelligent, active young woman in her late twenties, Paula had just married a young Spaniard. She was working as a volunteer with poor children at a Catholic school in Madrid when she became ill. Although porphyria is rarely fatal, due to an error in procedure, an accident, or some other unknown circumstance, Paula never came out of her coma and died on December 6, 1992. In spite of the fact that Paula was engendered by a tragedy, this is not a sad book, for Allende emphasizes the beautiful moments she spent with her daughter as much as the physical destruction caused by the disease.

"In her autobiography dedicated to her daughter, Allende finds an outlet for at least some of her traumatic symptoms by recording them in her writing and in the process creates a document that testifies to her pain and survival."

In her presentation, Allende spoke of the most difficult moments of her long, hard ordeal, but she also read humorous passages about her own life, including one in which she recounts her experiences as a chorus girl at the follies, when she was researching an article for a feminist magazine. I was impressed with the ease with which she passed from terribly painful to amusing segments of the book, laughing and provoking laughter, telling embarrassing anecdotes, answering difficult questions. Small, pretty, and very sharp, in front of an audience Allende is a professional in complete control of her medium—perhaps due to the long years she worked on Chilean television. It was obvious that this presentation had been carefully orchestrated and rehearsed, one of many that she was giving to promote her new book in countless cities. And yet, one sensed terrible sadness behind the protective shield. After the talk, several listeners remained in their seats sobbing disconsolately.

I asked Allende where she found the strength and vitality to do these presentations night after night, week after week—how she could go on talking about Paula and laughing, how she managed to get on with her life—because her energy was indeed amazing. "When the idea to do this book tour came up, I was terrified," she admits. "I thought I wouldn't be able to do it. Obviously because the topic is very hard for me to deal with, and also because it's all still very fresh in my mind. Two things have helped me a lot. One is people's reaction. There's a marvelous energy that the public transmits. You can feel people's affection, their openness, their tolerance, their understanding. So many people come up to me with a letter they've written on the back of a ticket, a little note, or a gift to tell me that they've lost someone close … Or often very young girls who identify with Paula … The second thing is that I read these texts in English, and the language constitutes a filter. These aren't the words that I wrote; they're the words of my translator, and that creates a little space between the text and me, which helps. But those few times I'll have to do it in Spanish I think will be very hard."

In her talk at Georgetown Allende spoke of the mask of language she hides behind. Nevertheless, people penetrate that mask and feel her pain. "It's that the pain is always there," she explains. "It's part of my nature. It's like wrinkles and grey hair. Those things are part of me now. I welcome a feeling that I know will be with me the rest of my life. Each time I see a long-haired girl in blue jeans walking down the street, I think it's Paula. And often I find myself with my hand on the phone ready to call her—because I called her all the time, almost every day—and then I realize that there's no place to call her. What I'm saying is, that's going to be with me always … and I have to live with it."

Four years ago Allende was at a party celebrating the publication of The Infinite Plan (HarperCollins), feeling elated, triumphant, thinking that she had reached the high point of her career, when she received the call that Paula was in the hospital. When she arrived at the intensive care unit and was informed of her daughter's state, she was convinced that Paula would get better. She began to write during the long hours of waiting at the hospital; it was a way of killing time. Besides, she thought that Paula might not remember certain things when she awakened, and the book—a long memoir of the author's life with family anecdotes and descriptions of the political situation—would serve to orient her.

"My mother told me: 'Write or you'll die,"' says Allende, "and I started to think that as long as I wrote, Paula would stay alive. It was a way of defying death. My mother saw the end way before I did. Life is full of signs and premonitions, if only we knew how to read them. I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with the truth."

"Allende believes that Paula is different from everything else she has written. 'I can't judge it from a literary perspective,' she says, 'and I can't compare it with other books because it would be unfair both to this book and the others; they're two different genres."'

Allende began jotting down her thoughts and recollections on a yellow pad. She didn't intend to write a book, so the procedure never became a literary project. "At least not while I was writing," she says. "Now it is, because it's out of my hands. But writing was so tied to everything that happened … From the moment when Paula got sick I began to write, and I wrote during the entire year she was ill and during the fist year of mourning. It was like part of the process, I never separated it completely. There are no variations in an illness like this one, nothing ever happens. There are no reactions. I wrote a lot of letters to my mother … when I went back over them I saw that none of them revealed any kind of change … Everything is the same from the first day to the last. Writing was a means of separating the days, of allowing time to pass and fixing it in my memory. It was like, by writing the day, the day happened. Without that, everything was the same. Writing was so tied to the process of grieving and also trying to help Paula that the book never developed an independent life. It's just that it wasn't a book. It started to be a book a lot later. So it never had its own life. When I wrote the last draft of the book, we still hadn't decided whether or not to publish it because I wasn't really writing it for anyone but myself, first of all, and then for my son, Nicolás, and my grandchildren. Porphyria is a genetic problem. Nicolás may have it. It might possibly show up in the children. It's a dominant gene, so it's very possible that the children have it. I thought it was important to leave them a testimony of what happened. Who knows when it might happen again?"

Nevertheless, today book publishing has become a commercial enterprise. Under the circumstances, marketing Paula must have been tremendously difficult for Allende. "I never had to do this before The Infinite Plan," she explains. "When I changed publishers, HarperCollins stipulated in the contract that I had to do book tours. And I did the one for The Infinite Plan under terrible conditions because my daughter had died some six months before. I had to go all over the country, to eighteen cities, talking about The Infinite Plan, which didn't have anything to do with Paula's story, with a truly broken heart. So that was a really traumatic experience. This time, as well, I approached it with certain terror, but it hasn't been so bad. Of course, I don't think of it as selling the book. Instead, I think of it as talking about Paula. And somehow a sort of spiritual clearing forms in which I can take refuge, even on this trip, because the topic is a spiritual one."

There has been a lot of talk about the influence of other writers, especially Gabriel García Márquez, on Allende's work. However, in Paula there can be no question of imitation. The tone is intimate and the voice, absolutely authentic. The author insists that the question was raised years ago with respect to The House of Spirits (Knopf, 1985) but hasn't come up since. "I believe that every story has its own way of being told, every story has its own tone," she says. "I had never written nonfiction before … well, of course, when I was a journalist, but I'd never written a whole book that wasn't fiction. But the tone of this book is very different from that of the others. This one is written the way I speak."

Allende believes that Paula is different from everything else she has written. "I can't judge it from a literary perspective," she says, "and I can't compare it with other books because it would be unfair both to this book and the others; they're two different genres … I don't know what I'm going to write in the future. I don't even know if I'm going to write. I feel that during my whole life I was preparing to write this book. And what comes after, I don't know. I have the impression that nothing. All I feel is a great emptiness."

As for her evolution as a writer, she says: "I've learned very little. I've learned to cut a lot, to be more and more critical of my own work. But I have the impression that for each book you have to start from scratch. I know certain things that I'll never do again. For example, I can't try to force the story or the characters in a particular direction because I have a preconceived notion of how things should be, because that doesn't work for me. When I try to do that, everything falls apart. I have to follow the natural course the story takes all by itself. As if I could just interpret something that's in the air, but not create something new. That's something I've learned. And I've learned to be disciplined. I don't believe in inspiration. I believe in work. In my case, inspiration doesn't cut it; what cuts it is sitting all day, six or eight hours, and working. And that's something I know now, so I don't even wait for the story to fall out of the blue because I know that won't happen. And to edit, to do a lot of editing. But I always have the impression when I start on a new project that I don't know anything. Nothing.

"It seems to me that all my books are written differently. The House of the Spirits has an oneiric, magical tone. Of Love and Shadows (Knopf, 1987) is a police story that could have been written by a journalist. Eva Luna (Knopf, 1988) has a very different tone because there's a strong element of irony; it's a book that can be read on a lot of different levels. On the first, it could just be the story of Eva Luna; on another, the story that she invents about herself; on another, the soap opera that she's writing about the story that she's inventing about herself. There are a lot of steps to reading it. And that sensation of peeling an onion, I had it while I was writing. It's very different from my other books. The Infinite Plan is a story that was already there. My job was to re-create it, but all the characters already existed, and the entire story existed. Even the title existed because my husband's father was the one who invented the religion called the Infinite Plan, and that's where the story came from. So I even stole the title from him. Everything!"

Allende also has a popular collection of short fiction, The Stories of Eva Luna (MacMillan, 1991). "People are always asking me for stories, but they're difficult to write," she says. "Stories are like apples. They come to you whole, round. Any little thing that's off, the story is ruined. There's one advantage, though: it's that you can work in segments, in segments of time. In two or three weeks, you can write a story. On the other hand, a novel is a commitment that can last two, three years. It's like falling in love. On the other hand, a short story is like a one-night stand!"

When she's working on a book, Allende follows a rigid schedule. She has one day—January 8—when she begins all her projects, "because it's too easy to put off writing," she says. "There's always something better to do, like play with the grandchildren, for example, so I need the discipline of always beginning on the same day. And once I begin, I don't start any other project until I finish the first one. I write just one book at a time, I never have several projects going at the same time. I write in the morning rather than in the afternoon because I'm more creative and energetic in the morning than in the afternoon. I get up very early, at six, and I go to another town, where I have a study, a garage that my husband fixed up like a study, and that's where I work. In the afternoon, at about two more or less, I have to take care of my correspondence. There's always more and more mail; we're forever waiting for it to crest and die down, but it doesn't, it just … it's like bureaucracy, it can only grow. Unless it's contracts, invitations … my assistant—who fortunately is also my daughter-in-law, Celia in the book—she takes care of all that. She deals with it … she's really my boss. The letters, the fan letters, I answer them all personally. Because, if a person is kind enough to write me a letter, to look up my address and send it to me, at least I can answer it. That takes quite a bit of time.

"Generally, I type right into the computer a draft into which I pour everything. That's the part I like best, telling the story, without worrying about how it will come out. And after I've written the whole story, which takes about three or four months, I print it and read it for the first time. Then I know what it's all about. After that, I begin to clean it up, to leave the main story and get rid of all the extraneous material. That's for a novel, not for a memoir or stories, which are different. And then, there's a second draft in which the story is there, defined, and another in which I only worry about tension, language … I polish it, I polish it carefully … I don't know how long that takes because with the computer you correct and overcorrect and correct again right on the screen … I don't print it each time. And when I have the feeling that it's pretty much ready, I print it out and send it to my mother in Chile.

"My mom reads it with a red pencil. Then she gets on the first plane she can find and comes to California. We lock ourselves up in the dining room to fight, and we fight for about a month. There's no better editor than my mother. She's heartless, absolutely cruel. She says things that would destroy any writer … If she weren't my mother, I'd have killed her already! But I know she does it because she loves me. She demands a lot from me because she loves me so much. She's not jealous of me, and she doesn't have a preconceived notion of what will sell, the way an editor from a publishing house might. A professional editor might be thinking … well, if we put a sex scene on page 40, we'll sell more copies. Such an idea would never occur to my mother. She just goes by the quality. She insists and insists. We polish it between the two of us, and then she leaves and I continue polishing the draft by myself, incorporating a large number of my mother's suggestions, but not all of them, because my mom, for example, is shocked by the fact that I include sex scenes in my books. Sometimes I don't even show them to her. Now, with the computer, I censor them before she sees them." Allende bursts out laughing, proof that she hasn't lost her sense of humor. "If there's some reference to the pope, I censor that too," she says, still laughing.

Although Allende's books have been translated into many languages and are praised all over the Western world, she has not been immune to negative criticism. I asked her how adverse commentaries affect her, whether they hurt her or simply roll off her back. "It depends," she answers. "There are criticisms that are just negative and others that are malicious. And there's quite a difference. I can accept that someone doesn't like what I write for some reason. But at times I perceive meanness in the criticism. Meanness that comes from the fact that I wrote something that someone doesn't understand for any particular reason. Or because there was antagonism there to start with. Sometimes it's happened to me that another writer, often a man, criticizes my work, and you can tell from his comments that he is envious. His tone is nasty. That bothers me. But it doesn't bother me that much, because in reality, public response is what really matters in the long run. There are criticisms that are very destructive. The worst review in the history of literature appeared in the New York Review of Books on Eva Luna. This is an important piece because it goes to all the bookstores, all the libraries, so any students or other people who are studying my work or want to know anything about me, the first thing they'll do is go to the library and look for criticism, and the first thing they'll find is that one, which is horrible. A man who is an expert on baseball and took a trip to Latin America wrote it. Someone thought that because he had traveled in Latin America, he was the person to write about Eva Luna. He didn't understand the book at all, and he tore it apart in the most vicious way possible. And that bothered me because, who is this guy? What moral or literary authority does he have to take a book he didn't even understand and tear it apart?"

In spite of being the subject of many studies and theses, Allende admits that she doesn't keep up with the latest literary criticism. "I never studied literature," she explains. "And I haven't taught it, either. I've taught creative writing, which isn't the same thing. So fortunately, I'm not up on all the theories, which terrify me! But I get a lot of studies done by students, books written by professors on my work … Generally, I don't understand them. I think it's the same with most writers. One writes as one can, the best one can, and it's the job of other people to vivisect what one produces, to explain it, but it's difficult for a writer to explain her own work. I have maybe four papers on Barrabás, the dog in The House of the Spirits … what the dog symbolizes … It was just a dog who lived in my house and his name was Barrabás, that's all! But how can I explain to a student who has been working on a thesis on Barrabás for a year that he's just a dog? I'd feel awful!" The author laughs as she remembers the strange explanations that some critics have given to different characters or episodes in her books. "I think it can also be very paralyzing if you have that kind of explanation in your head … if you're always thinking about those theories, about what the critics are going to say," she says. "You wind up writing for professors and critics, which is very dangerous."

Some feminist critics have insisted that there is such a thing as "women's writing," which, according to the French theorist Hélène Cixous, is more spontaneous, natural, and fluid than men's writing. Allende approaches these theories rather cautiously because, in her opinion, "women have been segregated from everything in life, including writing. So, when we talk about literature, we just suppose it's masculine and it's not qualified by an adjective. When women write, they call it 'women's literature' as if it were a minor genre. I think we women have to be careful not to fall into that trap ourselves. Nevertheless, on the one hand, literature is always the same and language, the instrument that we use, is always the same. But, of course, it's also true that there's such a thing as point of view, perspective, which is determined by one's sex, one's age, one's place of birth, the social class one is born into, the race one is born into. All these things determine a biography, a world view and, therefore, a form of writing. Why do women chose subjects different from the ones men choose? Why do women read certain books that just don't interest men, and vice versa? Because certain things are common to our sex."

The House of the Spirits, the book that launched Allende's career, continues to be her most highly praised work. In spite of this, however, it seems that certain aspects of the novel have been understood only superficially by readers outside of Chile. For example, The House of the Spirits is one of the few books that really show the diversity of opinion among conservatives during the socialist regime in Chile. Many of the conservatives of the generation of Esteban Trueba, the protagonist's grandfather, were afraid of change and unable to support socialism on ideological grounds, but felt that when Salvador Allende fell, Chile would return to its democratic roots. When they saw what Pinochet's dictatorship brought, they were horrified. Outside Chile, there is a tendency to classify the opponents of socialism automatically as supporters of the dictatorship. Nevertheless, Allende shows that this was not the case.

I asked her if she feels that readers grasp this aspect of the novel. "Some, yes," she says. "But others get angry. For example, when The House of the Spirits was published, it was during the worst part of the repression in Chile. And the message at the end is reconciliation. Not forgetting, but yes, reconciliation, with the idea that a new country could be built—or the country could be restored—only on a foundation of national reconciliation. It just wasn't possible to go on proliferating hatred systematically forever and ever, on and on, because that way we would never end the violence. That set very badly among the people who had suffered repression firsthand in Chile, because it was practically asking them to forgive in a period when no one was entertaining that idea yet. So I had a very negative reaction from the people on the left, and of course, a horrible one from the people on the right, because I tried to explain the circumstances under which the coup occurred; I spoke clearly of torture and the horror that took place under the military regime, which, back then, it was still possible to deny because we were living with censorship and self-censorship, so nothing was being published about it and people could say no, those are just Communist rumors and not accept what was really happening in Chile. Nowadays it's almost impossible for people to keep on denying it. It's very difficult. There are still people who do, but those are just dinosaurs who really don't matter. So I had bad reactions from both sides. But there was a huge number of people in the middle who did understand the subtleties of how things were, because in every family there were people on both sides. The country was divided, families were divided, couples were divided. So a lot of people did understand, and the book was very well received by those people in the middle. Now, how the public understands it in the United States or in, say, Denmark, I don't know. I just don't know."

In 1994 a film based on The House of the Spirits was released, with Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, and Antonio Banderas. It received mixed reviews, but the author liked it a lot. However, she says, "I felt a few things were missing. The lack of humor, that's what bothered me the most. I don't know if you know Jeremy Irons … he's the funniest person imaginable. I think that in the book, in The House of the Spirits, except in the very most tragic moments, there's a current of irony and humor that just isn't in the movie. I found that lacking, and also a more Latin touch … I would have liked more … more of that Latin tone. But I did like the film very much."

It is hard to believe, in spite of what she says, that Allende has no plans for the future. She is too dynamic to remain inactive, and she loves writing too much to give it up. She admits that she has already begun another project: "Well, January 8 always prompts me to begin another book," she says. "And I did begin something. Let's see when I finish with all this, if I can spend time on it and create another book. But I don't feel the passion to write it that I've felt before, with other books. I think it's because Paula is still too fresh. I just finished the memoir last October. It was published immediately in Spain in December. Everything has gone so fast that I haven't had time to breathe. It's been too fast."

In spite of how hard it has been, at least she is fortunate enough to be able to count on the support of her family: "I have a husband, a son, and a daughter-in-law, who want only for me to write, because that way I don't bother them. They want me to be locked up writing all the time. My husband met me because he fell in love with one of my books … Of Love and Shadows … He read it in English, he fell in love with it, and so he went to San José [California] when I was on a book tour, and that's where he met me. So, he came to me because he admired my work. And his admiration for my work hasn't diminished at all. It's a nice feeling because, as a Latin woman, I've had to struggle my whole life against the lack of respect of the male establishment … in every aspect of my life. For example, it took many years before my stepfather, whom I adore, was able to respect me professionally, in my career. He automatically respected the male children. Women, we have to earn respect from one day to the next. It's hard. To have to fight like that during your whole life leaves you scarred."

But Allende hasn't lost faith in people. She sees her book Paula as a celebration of existence, of all the things in the world that are beautiful and worthwhile. She concludes a conversation with these words: "The only thing I want to say is that this book, in spite of the tragic subject matter and the tragic circumstances under which I wrote it, is not a book about death. It's not a sad book. I think it's a book about life … about family … about relationships … about love … about all the things that are important and should be celebrated in my life and in Paula's."

Source:

Isabel Allende and Barbara Mujica, "The Life Force of Language," in Americas, Vol. 47, No. 6, November/December 1995, pp. 36-43.

Ruth Behar

In the following review, Behar calls Paula a "memoir of devastating passion," citing its "charged poetry."

"Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost." With those simple, enchanted words, the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende begins Paula, a memoir of devastating passion dedicated to her daughter. Sadly, unlike Sleeping Beauty, Paula Frias Allende will never awaken to hear her mother's tale. She has fallen, at the age of 28, into a sudden coma caused by the rare illness of porphyria, which has left her speechless, motionless, lost in an angelic stupor that is broken only rarely by tears and trembling. As her mother unfolds her tale, patiently seeking to awaken Paula and bring her back to the world of the living, Paula edges closer to death. By the end, she becomes a gentle spirit who appears to her mother in the night, asking to be released from the suffering and weight of her body. Allende must finally confront a harsh truth: not only that her tale won't save her daughter, but that she must cease her storytelling altogether, that it is keeping Paula strapped to a reality she no longer inhabits.

Paula, despite the title, is not a biography or even an account of the life of Isabel Allende's daughter. It is Allende's own autobiography, told to a daughter who has entered a limbo between life and death. Paula's entrance into that border zone becomes the occasion for Isabel Allende to tell her own life story. The dying daughter becomes a mirror in which the mother reaffirms her reality and comes to terms with the decisions she has made as a woman and a writer. In the cruelest possible twisting of the order of things, Paula must die before her mother, must become a daughter who gives birth to her mother. This unflinchingly honest self-portrait becomes Allende's parting gift to her daughter.

How inspiring it is for any woman who feels she has yet to do the work that really matters to read Isabel Allende's story of how she found her calling as a novelist. Allende recalls, "New Year's, 1981. That day brought home the fact that soon I would be forty and had not until then done anything truly significant. Forty! that was the beginning of the end, and I did not have to stretch too much to imagine myself sitting in a rocking chair knitting socks." Unable to imagine what she might do that would seem significant in her own eyes, she makes a number of sensible New Year's resolutions. She resolves to stay indefinitely in Venezuela, where she'd gone into exile with her husband, her two children, her mother and her stepfather in 1975 after General Pinochet toppled the democratic government of her uncle, Salvador Allende, and instituted a regime of repression, torture and terror. She resolves to continue working steadily at a school in Caracas for children with emotional problems, which will provide security and stability. And she resolves to "sacrifice love" for the "noble companionship" of a good husband, for whom she no longer feels any passion.

"The plan was entirely rational—and it lasted not quite a week," Allende tells us. On January 8, in a phone call from Santiago de Chile, she learns that Tata, her beloved grandfather, soon to turn one hundred years old, is dying. She begins to write a letter "to tell him he could go in peace because I would never forget him and planned to bequeath his memory to my children and my children's children." That letter, like a wild weed, quickly and unexpectedly grows into the five hundred pages of her novel, The House of the Spirits, and it is Paula who, in another strange gesture of premonition, tosses the coin that helps Allende choose the title of the book that will completely change her life.

Not long after, Allende writes a second novel, Of Love and Shadows, to prove to her literary agent in Spain that she is a serious writer and not just the accidental lucky author of a bestseller. All her sensible plans for a quiet and predictable life joyfully unravel. She quits her job at the school, gracefully undoes her marriage in a single afternoon and lets passion sweep over her in California, where she meets Willie, a cowboy-booted lawyer who'd given up on women, and overnight convinces herself and him that they have found in each other the passion of a lifetime. Sound romantic? Well, it is, and Allende, a magical writer, makes you believe that "happily ever after" is still possible, and in the very prime of a woman's life.

Now, Allende desperately wishes she could trade her life for her daughter's life. She is a privileged woman, in that she can afford to be present constantly at Paula's bedside and can hire others to help with all the complicated details of her daughter's daily care. But like Job she struggles with God, asking why her daughter had to be anointed early, so early, as a spirit? For a writer whose first best-selling novel was entitled The House of the Spirits, it is ironic to see that fictional house of spirits transformed into her real-life daughter's home.

Indeed, the Premonitions of her fiction haunt Allende throughout the writing of Paula. Especially eerie to her is the foresight embedded in her short story, "And Of Clay Are We Created," which was inspired by the 1985 avalanche in Colombia that buried a village in mud. Among those trapped was Omaira Sánchez, a thirteen-year-old girl who became the focus of attention of news-hungry photographers, journalists and television cameras that fixed their curious and helpless eyes on the girl who kept her faith in life as she bravely met her death. In that horrid audience of onlookers, there was one man, a reporter, who made the decision to stop observing Omaira from the lens of his camera and lay down in the mud to offer her what comfort he could as her heart and lungs collapsed. Allende, who was obsessed by "the torment of that poor child buried alive," wrote her story from the perspective of a woman—and she was that woman—"who watches the televised struggle of the man holding the girl."

Allende assumed that once the story was published (in The Stories of Eva Luna), Omaira would disappear from her life. But Omaira, she discovers, is

a dogged angel who will not let me forget her. When Paula fell into a coma and became a prisoner in her bed, inert, dying slowly before the helpless gaze of all around her, I remembered the face of Omaira Sánchez. My daughter was trapped in her body, as the girl had been trapped in mud. Only then did I understand why I had thought about her all those years, and finally could decipher the message in those intense black eyes: patience, courage, resignation, dignity in the face of death.

She reaches a paradoxical conclusion: "If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving …"

Like the reporter who joins the girl in the mud, Allende, too, relinquishes the detached observer position. For her, this means exiling herself from the territory of fiction, which in the past has allowed her to invent the destinies of her characters and so removed reality to a safe and controllable distance. Until her daughter fell ill, she remarks, she much preferred to write fiction. But with Paula's descent into death, Allende comes to feel she can only write about the world that lies insistently before her as if

"Paula is a heartbreaking lament, written with the charged poetry that emerges at those times when there is an urgent need to speak, though one knows that words, no matter how ravishingly spoken, will change nothing."

a dark curtain has separated me from the fantasy world in which I used to moves so freely, reality has become intractable … Everything is suspended, I have nothing to tell, the present has the brutal certainty of tragedy. I close my eyes and before me rises the painful image of my daughter in her wheelchair, her eyes staring toward the sea, her gaze focused beyond the horizon where death begins.

The pages of the memoir that Allende writes at her daughter's bedside in a Madrid hospital and later in her home in California are

an irreversible voyage through a long tunnel; I can't see an exit but I know there must be one. I can't go back, only continue to go forward, step by step, to the end. As I write, I look for a sign, hoping that Paula will break her implacable silence and answer somehow in these yellow pages …

Paula is a heartbreaking lament, written with the charged poetry that emerges at those times when there is an urgent need to speak, though one knows that words, no matter how ravishingly spoken, will change nothing. Isabel Allende couldn't save her daughter by writing Paula, nor even by enlisting every kind of therapy and remedy, from the most advanced biomedical techniques to acupuncture and astrology. And yet it is a tribute to Allende's skill as a writer and the depth of her soul-searching that Paula, written on the eve of death, is immensely life-affirming. This is one of those unusual books about suffering that has no use for pity, that manages, somehow, in a situation of utter depletion, to give much more to the reader than would have seemed possible. One reads Paula with gratitude for the way it poignantly marks the loss of a daughter while restoring faith in the power of language to free those of us women who are still in this world and still caught in the labyrinths of our own lives. And Margaret Sayers Peden's translation into English is so exquisite that the unpretentious lyricism of Allende's Spanish seems to glow on the page.

In the face of her daughter's dying, Allende may have felt unable to write fiction, but like Eva Luna, the protagonist of her third book, she has clearly set out to live her life "like a novel." Or at least, to her daughter, Paula, to try to awaken her, she tells her life as if it were a novel. In that novel of her life, Isabel Allende emerges as a woman who isn't afraid of her own desire, or her own happiness. She is able to admit, at one of the worst moments of her grief, "I have lived nearly half a century, my daughter is dying, and still I want to make love. I think of Willie's reassuring presence and feel goosebumps rise on my skin, and can only smile at the amazing power of desire that makes me shiver despite my sorrow, even push death from my mind." Embracing life and love with all her might, Allende honors the memory of Paula and lets her go, gently, back out into the universe.

Source:

Ruth Behar, "In the House of Spirits," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XIII, No. 2, November 1995, p. 8.

Sources

Caruth, Cathy, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Dockrell, Cynthia, "The Spirits of Isabel Allende," in Boston Globe, city edition, May 24, 1995, p. 75.

Holt, Patricia, "Love Letter to a Dying Daughter," in San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday edition, April 9, 1995, p. 1.

Iftekharuddin, Farhat, "Writing to Exorcise the Demons," in Conversations with Isabel Allende, edited by John Rodden, University of Texas Press, 1999, pp. 351-363.

Rodden, John, "After Paula" in Conversations with Isabel Allende, edited by John Rodden, University of Texas Press, 1999, pp. 409-420.

———, "Introduction" in Conversations with Isabel Allende, edited by John Rodden, University of Texas Press, 1999, pp. 1-31.

Warwick, Liz, "A Daughter's Death: 'The fact that Paula was born is more important than the fact that she died,' writes Isabel Allende," in Gazette (Montreal), final edition, June 5, 1995, p. C3.

Further Reading

Allende, Isabel, Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, HarperFlamingo, 1998.

Continuing in the vein of (at least somewhat) autobiographical writing, Allende composes a playful examination of the history of aphrodisiacs—including an appropriate cookbook.

———, The House of the Spirits, Bantam Books, 1982.

Allende's first book and an international bestseller, The House of the Spirits is a vaguely autobiographical story of several generations of one family as it weathers the changes in Latin America during the twentieth century. Often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, Allende's debut novel offers a magical depiction of her society through the female point of view.

———, Of Love and Shadows, Bantam Books, 1988.

Allende's novel describes a military dictatorship in a Latin American country and the protagonists' pursuit of truth which puts their lives at risk. Although veiled in the author's imagination and her characteristically mystical style, the novel is a documentary of Allende's experience in post-1973 Chile.