At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world’s most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That’s a lot of books.
Allende’s newest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle,” will be published May 6, and it’s about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende’s work, it’s a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it’s not that far off from Allende’s own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31, raising two small children and working as a journalist, her life was upended forever. That year a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her father’s cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote “The House of the Spirits,” which evolved from a letter she had begun writing to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway best seller and it remains one of her best-known.
Allende moved to the United States in the late 1980s, where she has been writing steadily ever since. But as she told me, she has never stopped longing for and thinking about her past — whether that’s her home country, her ancestors or her daughter who died young. After speaking to her, I think I understand why.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App
The main character in your new book, Emilia, doesn’t have a relationship with her birth father. She goes looking for him. I know you didn’t have a relationship with your birth father. I’m curious about how your mother talked about your father when you were young and how you thought about him. She never spoke about him. All the photographs in which he appeared were destroyed, and there was never a mention of his name. When we asked, she would always say, “He was a very intelligent man.” That’s it. She wouldn’t say why he left, why we couldn’t see him, no explanation. At some point, when they were teenagers, my brothers wanted to meet him, and it was a big disappointment for them because my father had absolutely no connection with them and no interest in them, but I never looked for him. Many years later, when I was working as a journalist, I was called to the morgue to identify the body of a man that had died in the street. And I couldn’t identify him because I had never seen a picture of him. That was my father.
First of all, that sounds terrible. No, it wasn’t terrible. I mean, it was terrible to see a corpse for the first time, but I didn’t feel anything, any connection, any compassion, any longing of any kind.