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A Memoir by Isabel Allende, Trans Margaret Sayers Peden 199Pp Review from The Guardian My Invented Country: A Memoir by Isabel Allende, trans Margaret Sayers Peden 199pp, Flamingo, £18.99 Isabel Allende has already published two memoirs, or three if you count the novel that traced her family history, The House of the Spirits (1982). All were triggered by personal crises. The novel, her first, was an epistle to her dying grandfather in Santiago, written from exile in Venezuela after the 1973 Chilean coup. Her memoir Paula (1994) was another confiding letter prompted by a separation; this time from her daughter, who lay in a year-long coma before she died at the age of 28. Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses formed an emotional sequel: the return to life after grief. My Invented Country had a twin spur. Settled in the San Francisco Bay area since 1987, Allende found that the terrorist attack of September 11, which coincided with the 28th anniversary of the Chilean coup, made her reappraise her national allegiances. At the same time her grandson, watching her fretting over her wrinkles in the mirror, reassured her she would live "at least three more years". Her resulting introspection gave rise to a book that is largely about herself in relation to her remembered Chile, which she has visited often since 1988 but has not lived in for almost 30 years. It was not only exile, however, or subsequent marriage to an American, that obliged Allende to "invent" Chile. Born in 1942 in Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat, she was four before she saw her country. After her father abandoned the family, she acquired a stepfather who was also a diplomat, and Allende spent much of her childhood abroad, in Bolivia, then Lebanon. Her real love of Chile grew in her teens, when civil war in Beirut in 1958 - a crisis also involving US intervention - meant that she was sent back to Chile to live with her maternal grandparents. "My grandfather was like God: infallible, omniscient, omnipotent," she writes. He took her on his travels up and down the elongated country with what its great poet, Pablo Neruda, termed its "longitudinal essences". She describes how, despite instinctive rebellion, she succumbed to convention by leaving school to marry her first boyfriend and serving him "like a geisha". Fortunately, she also heeded her grandfather's advice that the one who pays the bills rules the house, earning her living as a journalist and writer from the age of 17. Allende, whose maternal family was of Basque origin, writes that she inherited some French and Indian blood through her father. As a small child, she had her black hair dyed blond with bay rum. In a society based on a rigid hierarchy that was partly racial - the more indigenous the blood, the lower the class - she became aware of the despised Mapuche, the "people of the earth", and Aymaras, "children of the sun". With characteristic sharpness she describes the phenomenon of "situating", where, on first meeting, Chileans place each other in the class hierarchy by accent and appearance. Not only for its long democratic tradition before 1973 was Chile known as the "England of Latin America". Dispelling the mistaken view of Latin America as one culture, Allende contrasts the veiled machismo of Chile with the open braggadocio of Mexico; Chileans' austere drabness with the sexual openness she found liberating in Venezuela. Yet she contradicts herself constantly, first describing Chileans' distinctive sense of humour, then their total lack of humour. These inconsistencies have proved no obstacle to enjoyment of the book in Chile, where the Spanish original is a bestseller. Allende's most compelling observations are always the most personal. The debate in staunchly Catholic Chile over the ban on divorce is best revealed through her mother's experience. Allende's grandfather had the clout to get his abandoned daughter's first marriage annulled. But her new lover, also separated from his wife, did not. She never married the man Allende has known for a lifetime as her stepfather. Of the second fateful Tuesday, September 11 in her life, Allende writes: "We can't be neutral in moments of crisis." If in 1973 she lost a country, in 2001 she feels she gained one: "My heart is not divided; it has merely grown larger." Review from the NYTimes June 8, 2003 'My Invented Country': Life Within and Without Chile By PETER CAMERON Isabel Allende was born not in Chile but in Lima, Peru, where she lived until she was 4. When her father, a secretary at the embassy, deserted the family -- he ''went out to buy cigarettes and never came back'' -- Allende's mother was forced to return to her native Santiago. Allende spent the next five years living in Chile, until she moved to Bolivia, where her stepfather, another diplomat, had been posted. After two years in Bolivia, the family moved to Lebanon. She spent three years in Beirut before the civil war of 1958 caused the family to scatter: Allende and her brothers returned to Chile, and her mother moved to Spain before joining her husband in Turkey. On her return to her grandfather's house in Santiago, Allende was ''the most miserable adolescent in the history of humankind,'' no doubt due to her peculiar ''childhood and adolescence . marked with journeys and farewells.'' For the most part, she would remain in Santiago for nearly another two decades, marrying, working as a journalist and having a family before circumstances forced her to leave once again. In 1975, two years after the brutal military coup that toppled the socialist government led by her father's cousin, Salvador Allende, she fled, sleepless and trembling with fear, to Venezuela, ''carrying a handful of Chilean soil from my garden.'' For more than a decade, Allende lived in Caracas, until the publication of her first novel, ''The House of the Spirits,'' and the dissolution of her first marriage freed her to begin a new life in California, where she remarried and has remained ever since. It isn't easy to piece together this timeline after reading ''My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile,'' Allende's new memoir about her life within and without her native land. To make a coherent story of her experiences, a reader must sift and reorder fragments of information that are offered throughout the book, rather like shards of pottery murkily glimpsed at the bottom of a river, where a swift current constantly rearranges them. In many ways, given the tremendous amount of geographical, personal and political upset in her life, this disorder makes perfect sense. It is in Allende's novels -- many of them based upon her family's life and her own -- that coherence is achieved, for often it is only in novels, in art, where what has been irreparably sundered can be made whole. And so while this slim book may afford readers a truer and more intimate picture of Allende's life, it is a picture that seems both unnecessary and underrealized. Time and again, we learn that because an event, detail or story has already been told by her elsewhere, she will not tell it again. (''I won't expand on that here since I have already recounted it in the final chapters of my first novel and in my memoir 'Paula' ''; ''I won't repeat here the details of those years . because I have already told about them elsewhere''; ''I recounted her drama in the 'Stories of Eva Luna,' and I don't want to repeat it here.'') ''My Imaginary Country'' is full of holes that can be filled only by consulting the pertinent passages from Allende's earlier novels and memoirs. This can make frustrating reading for those who don't have her entire oeuvre in their heads or at their fingertips. Allende has no illusions about her haphazard scheme and its effect. ''This book is not intended to be a political or historical chronicle,'' she confesses, ''only a series of recollections.'' Elsewhere she reveals that ''I am writing this . without a plan.'' The book's random nature is reinforced by her casual, chatty tone, which is always charming and entertaining (although some of her humor can seem forced in translation; Allende writes in Spanish and is translated here by Margaret Sayers Peden). Her observations about how her initial estrangement and later exile from Chile have come to form her and influence her writing are interesting and sensitively expressed. ''Several times I have found it necessary to pull up stakes, sever all ties and leave everything behind.'' The first time she left Chile, as a child, she felt ''something tear inside me . an insurmountable sadness was crystallizing deep within me.'' ''The House of the Spirits,'' she tells us, ''was an attempt to recapture my lost country, to reunite my scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their memories.'' These observations about the effects of history and memory on her writing are surrounded by more generic observations about Chile and Chileans. As a reporter, Allende is prone to generalizations (''Chileans are bad-humored''; ''Cubans are enchanting'') and exaggerations (Chile ''is the most Catholic country in the world -- more Catholic than Ireland, and certainly much more so than the Vatican''; ''We drank more tea than the entire population of Asia put together''). These remarks may be characteristically Chilean -- ''we make statements without any basis, but in a tone of such certainty that no one doubts us'' -- yet they don't help conjure a particularly vivid portrait of the country. The freshest and most specific images in this book all come directly from Allende's life.
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