My Invented Country CD: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

Allende, Isabel

ISBN 10: 0060559276 ISBN 13: 9780060559274

Publisher: HarperAudio, 2003

Synopsis

A highly personal memoir of exile and homeland, filled with the wit, melancholy and distinctive voice that have charmed readers of her fiction. My Invented Country is a memoir about her native Chile that acknowledges the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping her life, her books, and her very connection to that most intimate place of origin. Allende revisits the imaginary Chile of her childhood and young adult years as well as the real one that exists today. She evokes the magnificent landscapes of the country, a charming, idiosyncratic Chilean people with a violent history and indomitable spirit, and the politics, religion, myth and magic of her homeland that she carries with her even today. The book curls itself around two life-changing moments. The assassination of her uncle, Salvador Allende Gossens, on September 11, 1973, sent her into exile and transformed her into a literary writer; and the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, on her newly adopted homeland. It speaks compellingly to immigrants, and to all of us, who try to retain a coherent inner life in a world full of contradictions.

About this title

Review:

"Nostalgia is my vice," admits Isabel Allende in My Invented Country. A question about nostalgia propels an exploration of her past, including the complicated history and politics of Chile, where she spent the better part of her childhood. Despite her strong connection with Chile, Allende says she has been an outsider nearly all her life. Her stepfather was a diplomat, so her family moved quite frequently. However, in her travel diary Allende compares everything to Chile, her "one eternal reference" point.

"From saying goodbye so often my roots have dried up," she notes. She successfully reclaims them, however, through two channels. Allende relays anecdotes about what she calls her untraditional family--whom she has based some of her novels upon, including The House of the Spirits. Like a few of her novels, though, her own story is lost in heavy policy analysis. Interspersed among her ancestors' tales is an all-too-exhaustive report of Chile: the terrain, its people, customs and language, its heroes and villains and its government.

Allende fled Chile after the military coup on September 11, 1973. Twenty-eight years later and now living in the United States, she is haunted by this date when terrorists attack New York City and Washington, DC. Allende admits that the place she is homesick for may have never existed. In spite of that, Allende asserts that she can live and write anywhere: "I don't belong to one land, but to several, or perhaps only to the ambit of the fiction I write." The irony is that she steadfastly has "one foot in Chile and another here". --C.J. Carrillo, Amazon.com

Review:

‘Allende’s writing is so vivid we smell the countryside, hear the sounds, see the bright birds, the scorched earth, smell and even taste the soft fruit.’ The Times

‘Allende has a gift for conversational writing and a sharp sense of humour...I very much enjoyed this visit to the other Chile, that half-remembered country of her imagination.’ New Statesman

‘Allende is incapable of telling a bad story. She writes of her own experience with a kind of wild candour. Her heroically sustained narrative, her lovingly prepared plots and surprise inventions explode in an exaltation.’ Independent

‘Lucid, original and expounded with an unquestionable sense of humor...part essay and part autobiography...When Allende poses sweeping general truths, she leaves room for argument...But the book gets my undivided attention when it expounds on the relationship of the author to that country of hers, invented, imaginary, fictional, to the story of her family, which is itself invented memory, and to her vocation as a narrator...It will provoke curiosity. And that is where everything begins.’ LA Times

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060559276
• ISBN 13: 9780060559274
• Binding: Audio CD