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

This book is a memoir and a bit of an autobiography of the author, Isabel Allende. In addition to pieces of her story and her family’s story we get a bit of geography of the country, ranging from absolute desert in the north to forested ski country in the south; almost impassible mountains to the east and the expanse of the Pacific on the west.



We get a mini-history of the country, which Allende knows well since at least one of her books, Ines of My Soul, is a fictionalized biography of a real historical figure in 16th century Chile, Ines de Suarez.

She tells us a bit about the indigenous peoples, the Mapuches and the Aymaras, both groups displaced and slaughtered by the Spanish and their descendants remain discriminated against today.

In several places the author attempts to tell us about the Chilean national character. Family oriented but pessimistic and moody… etc. Maybe that’s why so many Chileans become poets (Pablo Neruda)? LOL. As a professional geographer, I just have to be skeptical about any descriptions of national character. “Italians are very …. Portuguese people are always …..” Is any ethnic group NOT ‘family-oriented'???

We get a lot more about Chilean politics since the 1970’s when Salvador Allende, a democratically elected leftist president, was overthrown in a military coup encouraged by the CIA, afraid that Chile would ‘become another Cuba.’ A military dictatorship ensued until 1990. And, yes, they were related. President Allende was a first cousin of Isabel’s biological (but absent) father.

As the author tells us, those political events changed her life. She was a journalist and her outspoken reporting resulted in death threats to her and her family, so she moved to Venezuela before she could be ‘disappeared’ by the military thugs. After ten years in Venezuela, Isabel moved to the US, married an American man, and became an American citizen.

Isabel was actually born in Peru but moved at a young age to Chile. She never knew her father who left home when she was three. (Catholic Chile did not allow divorce in those days, so he remained her legal father.) She heard so much about the sprawling house of her grandparents, where many of their children and grandchildren lived, it assumed mythic proportions in her mind and became material for her first novel, the one she remains most famous for, The House of the Spirits. This book has almost a quarter-million ratings on GR and 11,000 reviews. Isabel has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author."

Other events in her life are tied to her books. Isabel had a daughter who died of a genetic disease just before she turned 30. That death, mentioned only in passing in this book, became the basis for her novel, Paula.

It’s always fascinating to me to find connections among books. My previous review was of It Would be Night in Caracas by Karin Sainz Borgo, about the disintegration of the nation of Venezuela. In that book, that author talks a bit about the influx of immigrants into Caracas when Venezuela was growing and prosperous with oil money. She tells us that many of these immigrants were fleeing military dictatorships in other Latin American counties, especially Chile. Borgo doesn’t mention Isabel by name, but obviously Isabel was one of those immigrants. And later in the Caracas story, the main character moves into an abandoned apartment and finds three books – one is The House of the Spirits by Allende!

I have read other works by Isabel Allende with links to my reviews below:

The Long Petal of the Sea

Ines of My Soul



Map from besthotelshome.com
The author from ft.com