Ten years ago the novelist Isabel Allende became a US citizen. Her passport identified her as an American, and she lived in California. But at heart, she said recently, she continued to be a Latin American from Chile, where her family's roots were and where she lived on and off for a third of her 60 years.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001. And as she watched the World Trade Center burning on her television screen, she said, her feelings about her identity changed. "Watching the towers burn, I didn't feel a distance at all," she said. "I mourned with everyone in this country."
Her pain was so raw, and her identification with the victims of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington so strong that Allende began to call herself an American. In her latest book, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile (HarperCollins), Allende uses that moment to illustrate how a sense of identity need not be linked to nationality. Sometimes it is shaped by years of living in another country, she said, or as happened to her it can be forged in one intense moment of spiritual connection.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"For the moment California is my home and Chile is the land of my nostalgia," Allende writes. "My heart isn't divided; it has merely grown larger."
Allende has lived in Peru, Chile, Lebanon, Bolivia, Switzerland, Belgium, Venezuela, and for the past 16 years in the US. This book, her 11th and her second memoir, is her first attempt to sift through a lifetime of memories and family lore and explore how being Chilean has molded her sense of identity and influenced her writing.
"Nation and tribe are confused in my mind," Allende said in a recent phone interview, echoing a line in her book. Her "tribe," she explained, is her family, her truest connection after a lifetime of constant uprooting. Because her family is Chilean, as were the rituals and customs with which she was brought up, she had always considered herself mainly Chilean.
The book is also a sort of travelogue through Chile, which she lovingly describes as "a nation of poets," where hens lay eggs "the color of gold," and fish sport "jeweled scales."
A reviewer in The New York Times Book Review described My Invented Country as "enticing yet frustrating," saying that rather than being a linear account of her life, the book feels more like a road map, pointing to events that have been fodder for her books. Allende dismissed the criticism. "Life is not like a German essay," she said. "Memories are circular, not linear."
Fact, fiction, memories -- real and imagined -- and family legends are the stuff of Allende's books, often described by academics as models of Latin American magic realism. But there is nothing magical about her books, Allende said. Her characters are real, she insisted, springing not from her imagination but from her extended family: the great-aunt who sprouted wings (in reality a bone deformity of the shoulders) in Stories of Eva Luna and the obese and arthritic great-grandmother in The House of the Spirits.
"With a family like mine, you don't need to have an imagination," she is fond of saying.
Allende, a daughter of a Chilean diplomat, was born in Peru while her father, a cousin of Salvador Allende, was posted there. One day when she was 3 her father went to buy cigarettes and never came back. Or maybe that's not the story at all, Allende conceded. She has also been told that he went to a party wearing a wig and dressed as a Peruvian Indian woman, had a wild time and forgot he had a family.
As a result, Allende said, she grew up in her grandparents' house, tortured by complexes and insecurities. She was the middle child and only daughter of an attractive, abandoned woman who had many suitors and no money. Once Allende was expelled from a Roman Catholic school because the nuns couldn't accept her mother's peculiar status.
Allende's mother eventually met another diplomat, but the couple could not marry, because in Chile divorce is illegal. Her mother, now 83, and her stepfather, 87, have lived together for 57 years, but they are still not recognized in Chile as married.
Allende did not see her father again until she was a grown woman and a familiar figure in Santiago as the host of a television program. One day the police called her to identify the corpse of a man who had collapsed in the streets, she recalled. The name Tomas Allende was found on an identification card in the man's pocket. Because the name was similar to her brother's, Allende raced to the morgue, only to be immensely relieved when she got there.
"I've never seen this man in my life," she said she had told the officer. "But my stepfather, whom I had called before rushing off to the morgue, told me that the stranger laid out in front of us was my father."
The only relative on her father's side with whom Allende had remained close was Salvador Allende, the country's democratically elected Socialist president, who died in the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973 led by Augusto Pinochet.
Two years later Isabel Allende -- by then a wife, the mother of two children, and a journalist -- fled to Venezuela. It was there that a long letter to her dying grandfather became her first book, The House of the Spirits. After two more books Allende quit her job as a school administrator and began to call herself a writer.
Her books quickly became international best sellers and were translated into English. Two have been made into Hollywood movies, The House of the Spirits, and Of Love and Shadow. During a book tour in the US, Allende, who had by then divorced the father of her children, met William Gordon, a lawyer. He soon found a novelized version of his life on the pages of The Infinite Plan, Allende's first book set in the US.
Married now for 16 years, they live in the Mediterranean-style home they built between San Francisco Bay and Tamalpais Mountain in Marin County. Allende's son, Nicolas, lives nearby, as do her grandchildren. She writes in an office by the pool, with no telephone to distract her, and surrounds herself with objects that, she said, help keep her connected to her past: an old carved wood table where her grandmother used to hold weekly seances in Chile and her mother's letters, which she has received almost daily for 45 years.
Allende and her husband have also renovated an old Victorian house, a former brothel, in nearby Sausalito, where Allende runs a foundation to aid poor women and children. She created it with the proceeds of Paula, the book she wrote about her daughter's illness and death at 29 in 1992.
Allende's rituals now include celebrating Thanksgiving with a feast and having a picnic on the Fourth of July. Yet there is much about the US that still baffles her. In her book she explains that she does not grasp baseball, "a game played by heavy-set men who wait for a ball that never comes."
She also cannot follow American political jokes because, she says, she does not see much difference between Democrats and Republicans. And, she goes on, she could never understand the country's fascination with what she calls "President Clinton's amorous dalliance."
In Chile, where her books are wildly popular, some critics have chastised her for defining herself in her latest book as an American with Chilean roots. She said she was puzzled by the criticism, but not hurt.
"I still carry my Chilean passport," said Allende, who often travels back to Chile to visit her mother and stepfather.
More evocative perhaps is the way she describes her relationship with Chile in the first pages of her book. Chile, she writes, is the land she invokes "in my solitude, the one that appears as a backdrop in so many of my stories, the one that comes to me in my dreams."
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