The hypocrisy of imagination

This chimerical quality would have worked well within a prescribed readership base, but when one book steers off in the direction of none-too-original children's fiction followed immediately by a nostalgic essay on the memories of her life in birthplace Chile, it leaves behind more questions than answers.

Therefore: Is Allende a feminist writer. Ans: She once was, but apparently no longer is. Q: Personal memoirs? Ans: Through most of her early books, and in Paula she even managed to wed Danielle Steele with Chicken Soup for the Soul. Q: And now? Ans: She's rambling, which isn't bad for an author, though she may be trying too hard to justify her escape from Chile and her subsequent life in America.

Chile, of all its Latin American neighbours, is probably the least exuberant among that group of nations, with a held-back quality that isn't so much stiff-upper-lip as oppressive morbidity, coming down heavily on the sense of joie de vivre that liberally qualifies everyone from the Cubans to the Argentineans.

Not so the Chileans who draw a veil over everything from affairs to divorce and re-marriage, accepting it all so long as it is not publicly spoken about, for that would bring shame to the family.

This Chilean hypocrisy permeates Allende's book too, for clearly it has been written in response to 9/11 and the issue of foreigners who have adopted America as their new home, vacuum cleaner and all, without the encumbrance "" as is felt by middle society there "" of loyalty.

What part, Allende says she was asked at a conference of travel writers "" a breed she claims not to be part of "" does nostalgia play in her writings? Anyone familiar with Allende's work "" chiefly The House of the Spirits "" would know only too well that her work is based on real-life characters (mostly family) and incidents dredged from her childhood memory. But, she counters herself, does she write realistically, or from a nostalgia tinged with romance for a country no longer hers?

Over such musings, Allende proves she can be funny, bitter-sweet, using herself as a foil for the many social conventions that made up her Chilean childhood. Even then, she had travelled the world with her parents, the beginning of a life in exile.

It was to become the pattern of her life, for after working briefly in the country, she would be forced to flee under Chilean dictatorship (following the assassination of her cousin, Chile's president, in a military coup) to friendly, sunny Venezuela. With this would come guilt: had she been right to escape, to abandon her family and friends? Would she be able to justify her flight to them?

To her credit, while she is concerned about having to defend her abrupt departure, she shares her loss of self-esteem as a result of the repression at home with the reader. Eventually, with the ghost of her marriage to haunt her, she seeks middle-age companionship with an American, setting down roots in the soil of a country of immigrants.

Allende's remembered Chile is part-real, part-fictional, the figment of a fecund imagination fed by stories heard from her grandparents at an impressionable age.

There is the inevitable familiarity "" and digs "" at Third World customs and mannerisms, the noisy world of remembered aunts and uncles and cousins, of false machismo and hysterical feminism, feasts, fights, laughter and death. Written from a foreign, adopted soil, Allende invents a Chile that even members of the family find more native to her mind than to its Latin soil.

Light humour drives the memoirs of the land of her birth. Typical of an exile, the memories of her relatives and their social mores are fondly sepia-tinged, her exasperation reserved for the politics and the business of the country, for its administration and corruption.

In the same vein, the physical changes are not welcome: sitting in materialistic America, it is easy to lecture on the evils of its encroachment in native Chile. It is an argument often ridiculously used by NGO lunching ladies in India: why must the rural women wear nylon, or use plastic, when the (more expensive) alternates "" natural fabrics, metal pails "" are so much more aesthetically pleasing?

That, in sum, becomes Allende's lament too. Displaced from her roots, she hankers for a country that, alas, has never existed beyond her imagination.

MY INVENTED COUNTRY

A Memoir

Isabel Allende

HarperCollins

Pages: 199

Price: Rs 295