Isabel Allende: Influential Novelist

Isabel Allende, a Latin-American writer, escaped her own assassination twice, and witnessed the destruction of her own family by her home country of Venezuela. Supporters of a military coup during the 1970’s directed their hatred and anger to the family, destroying their property and ultimately destroying their lives. Theses experiences kept Isabel Allende very close to her family, although later on finding herself in an emotional shock after the death of family members and substituting her pain by writing. In the midst of her life, Isabel Allende was inspired by her lifestyle changes during the Pinochet dictatorship and by the deaths of her grandfather and daughter to write such novels as Paula, The House of Spirits, and The City of The Beasts.

Allende had a displaced childhood up until the military coup of 1973 in Venezuela. At a very early age, Allende’s father, Tomas Allende, left Isabel’s home and mother behind (Rodden). The separation between Allende’s father and mother didn’t have an impact on her, but afterwards Allende’s mother remarried to diplomat Ramon Huidobro which complicated Allende’s life. As a diplomat, Huidobro took the family to wherever he worked, between Lebanon, Bolivia, and Chile until 1966 (Guardian). Since Allende was moving from country to country, she couldn’t keep a stable relationship with anyone outside of her family and the changing environments only confused and tortured Allende. This displacement created many of the plots and settings for her novels, especially in the City of The Beasts where the character gave the impression of being out of place. These emotions of loneliness and separation built into Allende’s writing style.

The military coup of 1973 demonstrated the evils of the incoming Pi...

... middle of paper ...

...Isabel Allende.” University of Texas. JSTOR http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/tpla/9901.html

This article is an interview between John Rodden and Isabel Allende explains the origins of her bestselling novels Paula and The House of Spirits. Rodden explains Allende’s character as down to earth and forthcoming and how January 8th had a superstitious significance. Allende speaks about the amount of pain she encountered when her daughter died.

John Rodden is a biography writer who has had the experience to interview other famous writers like George Orwell. Most of his books are written on George Orwell, although Rodden does have a history of writing articles for many North American universities.

Some points I want to include in my writings from this source are the specific details of Allende’s mental state during the writing of her second novel, Paula.