"Eva Luna", by Isabel Allende was first written in 1987 --translated from Spanish to English.
I've read most books of her books - but never read this one.....which is now available as a Kindle download-- for $2.99

Eva, ( a storyteller much like Isabel Allende, and revolutionary), begins this story -- narrating in first person. She describes her mother, Consuelo's, life. Her mother worked for a professor-- and usually did everything he asked her to do. One day an Indian Gardner was bitten by a snake. The professor left instructions of what Consuelo was to do to prepare him for his deathbed. Instead of following his orders she made love to him, thus conceiving Eva.
As a turn of events - the Gardner recovers - but Consuelo dies after choking on a chicken bone.
Eva is is left to fend for herself- an orphan. ...and after the professor dies her one friend, Huberto Naranjo at the time - and later sometime lover until she falls for another man - places her in the care a Lady Pimp named La Senora.
La Senora take Eva under her wing and gives her a makeover. Everything is peaceful for a few years until a new police chief moves in and crashes the brothel.

Next she meets Riad Hilabi -- a man with a cleft lip. Eva moves in with him and his wife, Zulema.
Things part of the story gets very complicated and dramatic- I won't spoil what happens -but soon Eva is going to flee again. ( after some 'close calls').
NOTE: This novel moves 'a little' slow until this point - I didn't mind - we are getting to know the characters...... but then things speed up - action gets moving!

Eventually Eva meets Rolf Carle. The two 'do' fall in love - but their love has a bigger purpose than just themselves - they are both strong characters wanting to make a difference.
Their life is about service. Eva and Carle both work together to help the guerrillas in releasing nine prisoners from jail as an act of rebellion.

Throughout the novel a parallel narrative is told about Rolf Carlie's life from childhood to adulthood. We learn what happened to him as a kid to make him the man he is.
It was nice to see a strong 'man' in this novel - as well a strong female....which Isabel is known for.

It's been a while since I remember reading early-fiction books by Isabel Allende. After her daughter died - she wrote two excellent non- fiction books. I treasure them both!!!
Later her fiction books began to get more and MORE contemporary. I liked them, but this is where Isabel's fans began to divide.
This novel was a nice RE-VISIT down memory lane. If readers liked Isabel' early fiction books - but missed this one - they are sure to enjoy "Eva Luna".
We will meet Mimi - the Beautiful and enchanting transsexual, and the Professor who is devoted to mummifying corpses. The characters are 'enchanting'.

There is political drama - sexual steam - history - comedy - tragedy -
mysticism....and Isabel's delightful creative imaginative storytelling.
OLD SCHOOL Isabel Allende!

If I could I would give this book a 3.5, but I don't think it was good enough to get 4 stars. I did enjoy Eva Luna, once again we see how Allende manages to weave her words together to create a tale of mystical characters, exotic locations and voluptuous sex scenes. She seems to paint everything with the hazy brush of memory, thus giving everything in her book an ethereal quality.

The plot of this book is fairly standard (guerilla army fighting for freedom) but it's quite enjoyable. One of the major issues I had with this book is that the first 100 pages seemed to do nothing but develop the characters and tell their histories, and that had the feeling of being done purely for the sake of it. I'd rather learn about my characters during the actual happenings of the novel, rather than having a couple of chapters which brushes past their history just to paint the picture.

The second issue I had was that politics wasn't a *major* theme at the beginning of the book, and then when the plot gets going we're suddenly plunged into the world of guerilla movements and corrupt political leaders and student riots etc. I'd rather she had taken the first 100 pages, and dedicated them to filling out the story she uses in the last 200.

All in all though, a good book and I will read her next book "The Stories of Eva Luna". This book has also given me a desire to read 'One Thousand and One Nights', which I'm about to order off amazon.

I don't know how to describe this book in a good way but I feel like the story is almost floating by. Hm in a good way, like a cold breeze in a hot summer day. You follow Eva Luna's life and she has quite the life and she is a storyteller. I've read this the first time in 2017 but even if I liked it then Isabel Allende isn't a writer I've rushed to pick up. Just a few here and there. But after reading a few recently I've fallen in love with her writing and is eager to read more.

I found that reading this book was a bit like attending a storytellers' cocktail party, at which the hostess (the author) has got drunk and decided to rapidly parade every unusual and eccentric character she could possibly imagine before the gathering, in order to impress her friends.

A host of unusual tales tumble out of this book, like so many magpie-gathered jewels that had been crammed into a box. Eva Luna hits us with one bizzare scenario after another, in rapid succession. Whilst an amazing and tumultuous tale is told, I found it a little frustrating... I wanted to know Eva Luna and the characters she encounters, a little more, explore their emoitional depths, understand their motives, perhaps even warm to them.

The book is suffused with lyrical flashes and memorable imagery and yet at other times I felt that monumentous events and important relationships are glossed over too rapidly.

Eva Luna has a gift. The child growing up in an unnamed South American country is blessed with the ability to weave compelling tales which enchant her audience - children and adults alike. It provides her with a way to survive in an extremely tough world. She is born into the underclass and jobs are brutish, insecure and poorly paid. People close to her die or get sick on a regular basis.

Cue a fascinating journey involving amongst other things mummies, a stuffed puma, corrupt politicians and policemen, a (Lebanese??) shopkeeper with a harelip, an old lady in a lifesaving coffin, street urchins and a smoldering revolution. Allende manages to pack so much life into a short book, much of the story is tragic but at the same time positive and life affirming.

Some great funny bits amongst the grit and grime - who wouldn't want to pour a full chamberpot over the head of a pompous politician?

A truly wonderful read

الكتاب التاسع لعام ٢٠٢٤


لي عليها بعض المآخذ

edit: colocando hoje, dia 3/02 Eva Luna como favorito porque desde que finalizei não consigo parar de pensar e me emocionar com essa história.

why are so many literary writers like you know what this novel's missing? a little bit of incest, for flair.

eva luna suffers the unfortunate fate of starting stronger than it ends. by the 60% mark, its magical momentum has petered out and the narrative begins to drag. like a self-fulfilling prophecy, its romance falls into the conventional, easy to anticipate formulas eva becomes used to reading in books, hearing on the radio, and watching on telenovelas. eva, a main character who was once so rebellious, wide-eyed, and full of wonder becomes a dull damsel whose life revolves around the many men who throw themselves at her feet. the progression of a plot filled with revolution, magic, and found family is hard to reconcile with the hurried romantic ending of the novel, or the way this romantic ending seemingly suspends eva's character development for the latter half of eva luna, so that she exists in a kind of permanent stasis.

i will say, this is magical realism through and through. its narrative landscape is bursting with detail, at times nonlinear, not relegated to one single geographic location or character's head. the style, as with many magical realist texts, is expository for much of the novel, something many reviewers appear to take issue with. this critique—that allende tends to tell more often than she shows—fails to acknowledge that magical realism was a literary movement in many ways born out of a tradition of oral storytelling and of observations of cultures caught in the throes of colonial rule.

the "show, don't tell" rule of thumb is to many a western invention that punishes nonwhite modes of storytelling for their ability to ground a story not in images, but in ideas. a number of these writing rules (long-held beliefs about telling a story "the right way") were popularized through the creation of the master of fine arts (MFA) + writing workshops in twentieth century america, which sought to stamp out leftist creative inclinations, effectively replacing manifestos, for example, with literary fiction. the CIA (yes, the CIA) peddled workshops like these to begin to build a western canon that would kill what they called "communist propaganda." this is something to keep in mind when you read a work, especially one from a culturally specific literary movement, and find yourself battling an urge to cry, "show, don't tell!"

eva luna's expository style is actually its strong suit. it's a dense read, yes, but its power lies in its ability to mimic oral storytelling traditions, to move through time and space at eva's whim, to span an entire lifetime and in so doing, trace a lineage of lives and deaths through the pangs of colonialism, magic, and desire. every time i pick up a magical realist text, i'm left reeling, delighted by density and detail, and this was no exception, in spite of the major issues i took with the plot mechanics. and, i should mention, the very dated writing, in terms of transmisogyny, orientalism, and questionable treatment of black characters.

Perhaps it is merely a reflection of my feebleness as a reader that I assume the basic conceit of any first person novel is for the author to be the narrator, more or less. In my defense, this book is dedicated to Allende's mother. And the story itself is about a girl who loses her mother and loves her mother deeply and has all kinds of wooooonderful adventures, only to discover writing and have even more maaaaaaagical adventures, and become highly successful, and be pursued by a general and also a communist rebel and a successful photographer. Everyone loves her. Something about it rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because I think the narrator is Allende and yet my main problem with the narrator is that she apparently has no flaws. She is never mean to anyone in the book, never angry, and, truth be told, never too interesting. People want a narrator who is riddled with doubt and self-loathing. Someone a little more like you and me. Instead we get heavy handed and self important:

"I just do what I can. Reality is a jumble we can't always measure or decipher, because everything is happening at the same time....I try to open a path through that maze, to put a little order in that chaos, to make life more bearable. When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be."

Barf. I will also say I disliked that the narrator had a quality of simply announcing the events of the book. One day she was just done with loving her communist rebel. Poof. One moment she just decided she was beautiful. Abracadabra. Always with little or no lead-up. I like to move with a narrator, not several steps behind her.

There were still flashes of the mystical storyteller I recall so fondly from House of the Spirits. Maybe I was just younger then. I don't know. All I know is I'm glad I checked this book out of the library instead of buying it.

«En el afán de complacerlo le había entregado su propia memoria, ya no sabía qué era suyo y cuánto ahora pertenecía a él, sus pasados habían quedado anudados en una sola trenza. Había entrado hasta el fondo en su propio cuento y ya no podía recoger sus palabras, pero tampoco quiso hacerlo y se abandonó al placer de fundirse con él en la misma historia…»

Leer Eva Luna me ha hecho confirmar el gusto auténtico que tengo por la manera de escribir de Isabel Allende. Esta novela, llena de amores y revoluciones, está escrita con una dulzura y pasión que es muy difícil de encontrar en algún otro autor. Isabel tiene ese talento innato de poner la palabra exacta en el momento adecuado para darle un toque poético a su narración. Al menos para mí, confundirme en su cadencia es algo que disfruto mucho cada vez que la leo.

Acerca de la historia, podría decir que me ha gustado que se aborden tantas temáticas en un contexto sociopolítico tan cambiante y confuso como el latinoamericano. Hablar de los ideales del amor, la justicia, la amistad, y enlazando para esto escenas reales y mágicas, terminan dándole un toque exótico a la novela que me dejó un buen sabor de boca.

Ahora me queda pendiente leer Cuentos de Eva Luna; que, si mantiene la misma sintonía, no dudo que lo disfrutaré tanto o más que este.

It's a witty, ironic, humorous, magic and unusual story containing many unconventional characters and events. Let's remember the extravagant owner of a brothel, the transexual Mimi,the inventor of embalming fluid who keeps his beloved mummies at home, the Turkish merchant with a harelip and his wife who has a lot of valuable jewellery but keeps it buried in the garden stealing only short glimpses on them while reburying them at a new place, the lunatic and cruel teacher who likes to stare at naked women with red high-heeled shoes moving in front of him but not touching them, the passionate leader of the guerilla war, Rolf's aunt and uncle preparing special food for arousing sexual feelings and Rolf's cousins both having so much love-making-related interest in Rolf, the godmother of Eva who gives birth to a beast, the grandma who keeps a coffin in her room and sometimes sleeps in it... :) Bits of history of the unspecified place in South America and a bit of Europe's war time period are here as well. And even when the story tells us about painful and sad moments of the main characters' lives, we still have an opportunity to smile time to time because of the writing style of the author. We find humour even in dark situations. The text is so rich, emotional and visual that it becomes a real pleasure to read it. Though when the story starts heading to the end (when Eva starts her love affair with Huberto Naranjo etc etc) the narrative becomes somehow slow and even a bit dull. But the very very ending is nice :) It leaves us to choose the way we want to finish the love story of Eva and Rolf. Let it be magic! :)

"Действителността е заплетено кълбо, не смогваме да я премерим или да я разгадаем, защото всичко става в едно и също време."