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

It has taken me a while to digest what I want to say about Allende's My Invented Country.
It starts off rather awkwardly with a catalogue of facts, about Chile, its geography and history. Once she gets to the history, we begin to hear a more characteristic voice, at turns wry, funny, horrified and horrifying as she sums up invasion, settlement/appropriation of land, interactions between the colonists and the native peoples, and the mores of the Chile her grandparents and parents lived in and in which she grew up - part of the time.
She mentions in this book that she dreams and writes in Spanish, and for me this was an illumination that explains much about her style. Thinking and writing in Spanish gives her access to memories and images that would be constructed differently in English. I wonder who translates her work into English?
Her strong opinions have driven her from her teens throughout her adult life, especially the rights of women and 'ordinary people' , mostly the poor and dispossessed. They drove her as a refugee from Chile after the coup, first to Venezuela and then to the US. Her outrage at the events of the coup and the repression and brutality that followed leap off the page.
She has a knack of writing about incidents in and periods of her personal life that are often imbued with emotion, but never cloying or embarrassing to read, unlike some other memoirs I have read recently. And of course much of her early family history and eccentric family life has found its way into her novels.
It's not a great prose work, but a book I enjoyed and will remember reading for a long time.