The Times of London heralded Allende as having "the rare ability to blend fantasy and legend with political fact and a well-plotted narrative to produce an enchanted world unlike anything else in contemporary fiction." The New York Times called the book "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America." Isabel Allende took the literary world by storm with the publication of "The House of the Spirits", a novel which chronicled four generations of a Chilean family against the backdrop of Chile's brutal history. She now lives in the San Francisco area with her American husband and their respective extended families. Afterwards Allende fled her home and settled in Venezuela with her husband, son and daughter.
She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup.
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East, as her peripatetic family followed her stepfather's diplomatic career. In Paula we understand that the miraculous world of The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna is the world Isabel Allende inhabits - it is her enchanted reality. The glorious characters of Allende's fiction - clairvoyants, revolutionaries, and most of all the questing woman who makes her way through storytelling - populate this autobiography, perhaps Allende's finest work, and certainly her most revealing. The result is a magical book that carries the reader from tears to laughter, from terror to sensuality and wisdom. Chile, Allende's native land, comes alive as well, with the turbulent history of the military coup of 1973, the ensuing dictatorship, and her family's years of exile.Īs an exorcism of death, in these pages Isabel Allende explores the past and questions the gods. In the telling, bizarre ancestors appear before our eyes we hear both delightful and bitter childhood memories, amazing anecdotes of youthful years, the most intimate secrets passed along in whispers. During months in the hospital, the author began to write the story of her family for her unconscious daughter. In December 1991, Isabel Allende's daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and shortly thereafter fell into a coma. The point of departure for these moving pages is a tragic personal experience. Paula is a soul-baring memoir, which like a novel of suspense, one reads without drawing a breath. With Paula Allende has written a new tour de force, a powerful autobiography whose straightforward acceptance of the magical and spiritual worlds will remind readers of her first book, The House of the Spirits. One of the most highly praised and widely read writers of fiction to come out of Latin America in this century, Isabel Allende has mesmerized readers throughout the world with her own blend of magical realism, politics, and romance.
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