Eva Luna se ha transformado en uno de mis favoritos de la autora.
La novela habla de su protagonista y como se las arregla para subsistir por lo que se trata de una gran historia de superación personal.
Me encantó la diversidad de personajes cuál más excéntrico. Tiene atisbos de realismo mágico no tan marcado como en otros de sus libros.
Además cuenta con mucha información sobre la historia de un país que no lo dice en el libro pero se entiende que es Venezuela.
En el libro conocemos que Eva Luna se inventa algunas historias y las cuenta a otros personajes, pero como lector nunca las llegamos a conocer, por lo que posteriormente se publicó el siguiente libro de la Autora con Los Cuentos de Eva Luna.
Totalmente recomendado.

I can’t say this book is among my five favorite from Isabel Allende, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a really good book. It mostly means Allende is an excellent writer, and there are many of her books to make the list.

One of the things I liked most, is the dual narrative. One side telling the story of Eva, the protagonist, conceived when Eva’s mother takes pity on a man who after being bitten by a snake is condemned to death, and Rolf, whose destiny finally brings him to South America where he will, eventually, fall in love with Eva.

An excellent example of the amalgam of mystic and brutality that is Magic Realism, Eva Luna transports us to places and times that exist but never as in the narrative, which fills them with spirits and fairies and the unseen miracles of the everyday.

"She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea."

I've read a few of Allende's novels and her memoir. I must say, I've settled on this one as my favorite just as one would settle on choice of wine: a few sips here and there, tightening of the tastebuds around one flavor and the instinctive feeling. Not too much logic involved, only how it makes a person feel.

This story spans decades, as one has always come to expect of the Allende novel. The storytelling is refined and told in the retrospective view, something Allende does masterfully. As usual, she gives justice to the inner psyche of her many characters, protagonists and antagonists alike. There are so many characters and yet so much intimacy as each character is deftly explored and familiarity established. Maybe this is what enticed me during the many days I stayed with this book.

Or maybe I was drawn to the dance of Eva Luna, she who name means life. It's possible that as Eva went from the young girl who battled many obstacles to the fearless young woman she became, I was drawn to her risky love choices and her modern political reality. There is a certain mystical realism that is utterly convincing but most importantly, I love how Eva uses her imaginative strength to triumph over a challenging reality.

Como ame leyendo este libro, no quería terminarlo nunca. Historias de superación y realizacion que te llegan al alma. Altamente recomendable!!!!!!

Il mio percorso verso questo romanzo è stato piuttosto strano, dato che ho letto prima Eva Luna racconta e solamente poi questo libro, sovvertendo l’ordine di scrittura e di pubblicazione. D’altra parte, questo fatto non ha assolutamente inficiato la piacevolezza della lettura, anzi; ritrovare alcuni personaggi e conoscere più a fondo la loro storia mi ha fatto soltanto piacere (e penso che questa sensazione sia stata provata anche da chi ha letto i libri “in ordine”).

E’ questo, senza alcun dubbio, il pregio maggiore dei libri della Allende: la creazione un gruppo di personaggi assolutamente fuori dal normale, dalle vite piene di episodi incredibili, e allo stesso tempo capace di mostrare una realisticità non indifferente, che permette di empatizzare e identificarsi con loro (o detestarli con forza, a seconda).

In particolare, mi sono piaciuti tantissimo Rìad e Rolf, e mi ha fatto piacere rivedere la maestra Inés, che avrà lo spazio che merita in uno dei racconti della raccolta di cui ho parlato più su.
Rìad è un personaggio buono ma imperfetto, che proprio per questo si fa amare; il sentimento paterno che prova verso Eva è bellissimo. Non sono riuscita ad apprezzare del tutto una certa svolta che la Allende ha fatto vivere a questo personaggio, tuttavia continuo ad apprezzarlo.
Rolf appare soprattutto nella seconda parte del libro, cosa che un po’ m’è spiaciuta, perché il suo personaggio mi interessava molto. A volte mi è sembrato che il suo sviluppo andasse un po’ “a balzi”, ma in generale è davvero ben descritto; leggere dell’incrociarsi della sua vita e di quella di Eva è stato bello.

Ed è proprio lei che risalta su tutti, com’è giusto che sia: Eva Luna. Non mi sorprende che l’Allende abbia scritto la raccolta di racconti citata prima; la voce di Eva Luna è sorprendente e meritava altro spazio tutto per sé. E’ impossibile non sovrapporre un poco queste due figure femminili – non confondendole, ma trovando per ognuna nuove sfumature, grazie al carattere dell’altra.
Eva è forte, determinata e pronta a percorrere il cammino che la porterà a una completa coscienza di sé: possiamo osservarla mentre cresce, mentre diventa prima una ragazza, poi una giovane donna, ma soprattutto la seguiamo mentre si scopre attraverso l’amore, che rimane uno dei punti fermi della narrazione della Allende.
Amore che appare in molte delle sue sfaccettature: quello carnale, quello della famiglia, quello sentimentale (si potrebbe definirlo quasi spirituale), quello per le parole…
Mi è sembrato che fosse soprattutto quest’ultimo ad aleggiare sopra tutte le pagine di questo libro, permeando quasi tutte le azioni di Eva Luna. Il suo amore per le storie è insopprimibile e, di nuovo, non riesco a fare a meno di individuare qualcosa dell’autrice stessa in questo atteggiamento.

La Allende, tra l’altro, riesce a rendere giustizia a questo suo amore scrivendo davvero bene, con uno stile espressivo che riesce a raccontare situazioni e personaggi talvolta con ampie vedute e leggere digressioni, altre volte concentrandosi su particolari specifici e interessanti.
Riesce a gestire bene anche l’alternarsi della narrazione in prima e in terza persona singolare (la prima persona è dedicata esclusivamente a Eva, la terza a Rolf).

Non mi ha del tutto convinta, invece, l’andamento generale della storia. Da quando Eva Luna arriva ad Agua Santa le vicende sembrano perdere un poco del loro mordente; come se l’Allende si stesse dirigendo verso la fine del libro in modo un po’ troppo frettoloso per i miei gusti. Di solito è un’autrice che riesce a alternare con sapienza parti in cui “comprime” un lungo lasso di tempo in pochi periodi, e parti in cui invece si concentra nella descrizioni di avvenimenti anche brevi, ma fondamentali; in questo caso, invece, mi sembra che si vada verso il finale come se si stesse seguendo una climax discendente. Non che diventi una brutta lettura, per carità – avrei evitato di scrivere i complimenti che ho rivolto all’autrice nei paragrafi qui sopra, se fosse stato così! Semplicemente, credo che la prima parte sia decisamente più piacevole.

In ogni caso, avendo ormai letto qualche libro della Allende, posso affermare che è un’autrice nelle mie corde; credo sia arrivato il momento di affrontare il suo romanzo più celebre, La casa degli spiriti. Intanto, Eva Luna si merita senza dubbio un ottimo voto!

n  إنني أحاول شق طريق وسط هذه المتاهة ، وأن أضفي شيئا من النظام على هذه الفوضى الكبيرة ، وأن أجعل الحياة محتملة. عندما أكتب أتحدث عن الحياة مثلما أحبها أن تكون " n

n  [image error]n

الرواية دى بالنسبالى جات زى هدية كده في وقتها المناسب لاني كنت عايزاها اقراها جدا يمكن عشان مكانتش متاحة قدامي

تدخل قائمة أفضل خمس كتب في عام ٢٠٢٣. ♥️

The Good:
The characters are all amazing - mythical figures inhabiting an unnamed part of Latin America some time in the middle of the 20th century. The setting is vivid, and the series of vignettes through the first half of the book read like fairy tales. It's also pretty funny.

The Bad:
The sense of magic really died away in the second half. It became a fairly shallow political story full of neat resolutions and pleasant anticlimaxes. And books about writers always feel a bit self-congratulatory.

'Friends' character the protagonist is most like:
Eva is the emotional rock to her loved ones, and fiercely loyal, just like Joey. She also works in media.

The first half of Ms. Allende's novel is somewhat erratic, a bunch of stories that seem unconnected...except for narrator, Eva Luna, who does not even take part in some of the stories.

So you ask, What keeps me reading this book that at times seems disconnected? The answer: a group of characters that are so unbelievable, interesting, and original that I never considered putting the book down and couldn't stop reading.

I believe, that characters are what drive a story and in the end, as some time has passed, you remember the characters more than the story. I call it the "Michael Corleone Syndrome." When I have asked Godfather 1 and 2 enthusiasts what they remember about the stories they always say Michael Corleone or Vito Corleone and seem to skip over my question about the story and plot.

In the first half of "Eva Luna," and throughout the book the characters might not be up to the "Michael Corleone standard" but they are not far behind. The Professor, for example, is a man who wants to cure cancer but since almost all his patients die he decides to embalm them and put them in a seperate room in the house that is like a museum.

The plump but pretty sisters, who have thrown tradition to the wind, decide to fulfill their passions by a having threesomes with their cute cousin. It's simply the pleasure of the whole thing and they follow the Freudian theory of the pleasure principle to the extreme without any qualms.

Eva mother's was impregnated by a dying man who at the time when she was cleaning his soiled body she noticed he had an erection, and not one to deny a dying man his wish she has sex with the man and that all it takes to get her pregnant with the wonderful Eva. The man died right after the ejuculation.

These are just a few on the characters, and when we come across them in the second half of the novel, at times a hundred and fifty pages later, you have no problem remembering any of them. It is in the second half of this beautiful, character driven novel that it all comes together. This is a wonderful novel, true to my 'Michael Corleone Syndrome.'

Esta es la historia de Eva un joven huérfana, que a travez de sus cuentos nos narra un poco de su vida, con personajes muy pintorescos, sus aventuras y desventuras. Eva Luna tiene un carácter fuerte y una desbordada imaginación, tiene una facilidad nata para contar e inventar historias, que muchas veces mezcla con su propia realidad. La escritora toca los temas de suicidio, prostitución, violencia, amistad y pobreza, con la naturalidad de la pluma de Allende

Isabel Allende está entre os meus escritores favoritos... e ler Eva Luna foi mais um longo feitiço invocado em histórias maravilhosas interligadas por personagens inesquecíveis.
Deixo-me encantar com todo o gosto :)

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Isabel Allende. Eva Luna was published in 1987 and there is little to suggest that I’d fall under the spell of this novel. I didn’t cotton to South American magical realism by a different author, nor did I want to read a lot of colorful hooptedoodle with no story. But with a command of the page that reminded me of W. Somerset Maugham, Allende has such a strong storytelling impulse and talent for painting with words that I was caught up in the best question a reader can have: “What happens next?”  

The story is the first person account of Eva Luna, beginning at the earliest known record of her mother and proceeding through a life of poverty, servitude, narrow escapes, riches, revolution and love until our narrator meets the man she feels is her mate. Her mother was discovered by Catholic missionaries on the dock of a riverside mission in the jungle of some South American country. The men baptize the child with fiery hair the first female name that comes to mind: “Consuelo.”  

With no recollection of her past, Consuelo invents an origin story involving a Dutch sailor setting her adrift in a rowboat. At the age of 12, she meets a Portuguese man who harvests chickens, spending all day with him romping through the jungle, catching and slaughtering the birds. Alarmed by this development, the missionaries send Consuelo to the city to obtain a proper vocation for a Christian woman. They forbid her from taking her parrot or monkey companions along. 

The journey began by canoe, down tributaries that wound through a landscape to derange the senses, then on muleback over rugged mesas where the cold freezes night thoughts, and finally in a truck, across humid plains through groves of wild bananas and dwarf pineapple and down roads of sand and salt, but none of it surprised the girl, for any person who opens her eyes in the most hallucinatory land on earth loses the ability to be amazed. On that long journey, she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows. Once her tears were exhausted, she closed her lips, resolving from that moment forward to open them only when it could not be avoided. Several days later, when they reached the capital, the priests took the terrified girls to the Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity, where a nun with a jailer’s key opened an iron door and led them to a large shady patio with cloistered corridors on four sides; in the center, doves, thrushes, and hummingbirds were drinking from a fountain of colored tiles. Several young girls in gray uniforms sat in a circle; some were stitching mattresses with curved needles while others wove wicker baskets. 

After three years in the convent, Consuelo shows inclination toward little more than daydreaming. She's placed in the house of a foreign doctor who's developed a highly advanced embalming process for preserving the dead. When their gardener is bitten by a viper, Consuelo deprives her employer of another test subject by saving the Indian's life and hastily conceiving a child with him while he's recovering. A daughter without fangs or scales is born. Consuelo names her Eva ("So she will love life") and without any last name, provides the name of her father's tribe: Luna.

Eva Luna grows up in the house of the professor with little contact with the outside world or other children. On Christmas Eve when she's 6, Eva's mother swallows a chicken bone and dies fearlessly. Eva is raised by her madrina, her godmother, the professor's cook, a devout Catholic from which Eva inherits a defiant independence. As the professor's health fades, she cares for him and upon his death, is named his sole heir, a distinction that doesn't trouble the pastor from claiming all the professor's goods.

At the age of 7, Eva is sent from the place of her birth to earn a living. She befriends a black cook named Elvira but runs afoul with the patrona of her new house, a spinster who does not appreciate Eva's daydreaming. Her cruelty provokes Eva to snatch her employer's wig off her head and flee. She's found in the street by a rascal boy named Huberto Naranjo. He's endeared by Eva's talent for storytelling, but savors his freedom more. Huberto Naranjo convinces Eva to return to her patrona, which she does, for several years at least.

Every time I looked outside from the balcony, I realized that I would have been better off had I not come back. The street was more appealing than the house where life droned by so tediously--daily routines repeated at the same slow pace, days stuck to one another, all the same color, like time in a hospital bed. At night I gazed at the sky and imagined that I could make myself as wispy as smoke and slip between the bars of the locked gate. I pretended that when a moonbeam touched my back I sprouted wings like a bird's, two huge feathered wings for flight. Sometimes I concentrated so hard on the idea that I flew above the rooftops. Don't imagine such foolish things, little bird, only witches and airplanes fly at night. I did not learn anything more of Huberto Naranjo until much later, but I often thought of him, placing his dark face on all my fairy-tale princes. Although I was young, I knew about love intuitively, and wove it into my stories. I dreamed about love, it haunted me. I studied the photographs in the crime reports, trying to guess the dramas of passion and death in those newspaper pages. I was always hanging on adults' words, listening behind the door when the patrona talked on the telephone, pestering Elvira with questions. Run along, little bird, she would say. The radio was my source of inspiration. The one in the kitchen was on from morning till night, our only contact with the outside world, proclaiming the virtues of this land blessed by God with all manner of treasures, from its central position on the globe and the wisdom of its leaders to the swamp of petroleum on which it floated. It was the radio that taught me to sing boleros and other popular songs, to repeat the commercials, and to follow a beginning English class half an hour a day: This pencil is red, is this pencil blue? No, that pencil is not blue, that pencil is red. I knew the time for each program; I imitated the announcers' voices. I followed all the dramas; I suffered indescribable torment with each of those creatures battered by fate, and was always surprised that in the end things worked out so well for the heroine, who for sixty installments had acted like a moron.

This takes us one-fourth of the way through Eva Luna. I was left wanting more. Part of the wonder of this novel is that I can open it to any page and every paragraph is dynamite. Allende doesn't limit her fine writing to the beginning of a chapter. Every page holds a highlight. She not only imagines everything in her world down to the furniture but uses every color and all of her senses to bring that world to life. Characters make discoveries and leave their wisdom behind. In Allende's world, sex is natural, playful and copious.

What did they do when they were alone? Nothing new; they played the same game cousins have played for six thousand years. Things became interesting when they decided to spend nights three in a bed, calmed by Rupert's and Burgel's snoring in the adjacent room. To keep an eye on the girls, the parents slept with their door open, and that also allowed the girls to keep an eye on them. Rolf Carlé was as inexperienced as his two companions, but from the first encounter he took precautions not to get them pregnant, and poured into the erotic games all the enthusiasm and inventiveness he needed to make up for his anatomy ignorance. His energies were endlessly fed by the formidable gifts of his cousins--open, warm, smelling of fruit, breathless with laughter, and exceedingly receptive. Furthermore, having to maintain absolute silence--terrified at the creaking bedsprings, huddled beneath the sheets, enveloped in one another's warmth and aromas--was a spur that set their hearts aflame. They were at the perfect age for inexhaustible lovemaking. The girls were flowering with a summery vitality, the blue of their eyes deepening, their skin becoming more luminous, and their smiles happier; as for Rolf, he forgot his Latin and went around bumping into furniture and falling asleep on his feet; he was only half awake as he waited on the tourists, his legs trembling and his eyes unfocused.

Allende does paint the world as Eva Luna remembers it, but rather than what I think of as "magical realism," this is a world that could exist. Radio soaps and telenovelas pop up throughout the story and some of the descriptions of the little orphan tilt toward the dramatic, but this is the sort of "dramatic" that I enjoy: imaginative, exciting, with bad heroes and good villains and high passions. I couldn't wait to open this book up again to see what Eva Luna was up to. That, in my mind, is what separates this from Hooptedoodle and makes it my favorite read of the year.

Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru to Chilean parents. Her father, a diplomat, deserted them when Isabel was 2. Her mother returned to Santiago, Chile with three children to live with Allende’s maternal grandfather. The financial and social disempowerment of her mother grew a rebellious streak in Allende against patriarchal society. Her mother remarried another diplomat and moving as he changed posts, Allende attended an American private school in Bolivia and an English private school in Beirut, Lebanon. At age 20, she married an engineering student in Chile and had two children.

In 1967, Allende co-founded the feminist magazine Paula and penned a series of satirical columns for it. Her paternal uncle Salvador Allende, elected the first socialist president of Chile in 1970, shot himself three years later during the U.S. backed military coup by Augusto Pinochet. Allende would flee to Venezuela with her two children. During her exile, she wrote a novel, The House of the Spirits, published in 1982 in Argentina and later to international acclaim.  She lives in San Rafael, California with her third husband, an attorney who Allende married when she was 77. 

 

In 2014, Allende was among those awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in the annual White House ceremony. The president said: “When Isabel Allende learned that her grandfather in Chile was dying, she started writing him a letter. Night after night, she returned to it – until, she realized, she was actually writing her first novel. She’s never really stopped. Her novels and memoirs tell of families, magic, romance, oppression, violence, redemption-– all the big stuff.

But in her hands, the big becomes graspable and familiar and human. And exiled from Chile by a military junta, she made the U.S. her home; today, the foundation she created to honor her late daughter helps families worldwide. She begins all her books on January 8th, the day she began that letter to her grandfather years ago. ‘Write to register history,’ she says. ‘Write what should not be forgotten.’” 



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith