Lauren 's Reviews > My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

"Don't believe everything that I say: I tend to exaggerate and, as I warned in the beginning, I can't be objective where Chile is concerned."
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From MY INVENTED COUNTRY: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, by Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, 2003.

My first Allende. Not sure if this was a good place to start. Definitely gives some context for her novels.

Imagine a dinner with an older and very opinionated relative you haven't seen for a long time. You listen to them talk [a lot] about everything under the sun. Some things sad, others funny - eccentric family members, who left their spouse, who had a child out of wedlock... Some of it you've heard before, some of it new and juicy gossip. Some truth bombs, some call-outs. Some mildly racist and/or un-PC comments (*shhh! Please don't say that, Tía Isabel!*) 😖 Entertaining in spots? Yes. Cringe-worthy in spots? Also yes.

"We Chileans enjoy funerals because the dead person is no longer a rival, and now he can't backstab us."

Several times while reading this memoir, I pictured her as a somewhat liberated/updated version of Dowager Countess Violet Crawley, Maggie Smith's character from Downton Abbey. She speaks her mind and doesn't make apologies for it... Privileged, bourgeois, silver-spoon... Other than the opening quote where she simply states that she's prone to exaggeration.

The first two - thirds talk about her history and family, her childhood years away from Chile, and her youth with her grandfather, inspiring her first novel, The House of Spirits. In the last third, likely the best part of the book, she discusses the US-backed coup d'etat, and overthrow of her cousin, the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende, by the military junta of Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

She readily admits that the Chile that she so loves may have never actually existed (hence, the "invented" in the title), and waxes on nostalgia and memory. It's all over the place thematically, but gave me some first-hand narrative context on modern Chile, its landscape, culture, and politics.