I receive a series of newsletters from a chain of bookstores called Exclusive Books. Normally I skim through them and delete them or file them (depending on my mood at the time). I received one in the last day or so which contains a little bit about the famous author, Isabel Allende. I haven’t read any of her books as they are a little heavy for me and not really the kind of fiction I enjoy reading. Just the same, this newsletter has some interesting information about her (I Googled some of the material to identify a source for the information with no luck):
Isabel Allende’s stepfather called her a mythomaniac, claiming that her perspective is false, but for Isabel Allende it is just another form of mutable truth. She sees things as highlights, emotions, and as the invisible web that somehow links them. Allende always begins a book on the 8th of January, a day she considers lucky as it was the day she began writing a letter to her dying grandfather, which later became the very popular The House of the Spirits. Allende spends ten to twelve hours a day alone writing, not talking to anybody or answering the phone. She simply acts as a medium through which the voices from the "fiction world" can talk. She is never conscious of what she is writing, but by "lying-in-fiction" she has learned a lot about herself and life.
Allende finds it strange that her work is described as magical realism, because all her writing comes from some sense of her own loss or struggle, and what other people might find strange or supernatural is quite ordinary and real to her Her work has been shaped by both the mystical elements of her past and the hard-core reality of life, and she invents stories with the specific goal of easing suffering and making the time pass more quickly. She has also been quoted as saying that her writing has the power to seduce; she feels that the greatest aphrodisiac is imagination.
RSS – Posts
What do you think?