Content area
Full text
Review Essay: The Multinational Latin American: Memoirs of Isabel Allende and Alma Guillermoprieto
Allende, Isabel. Mi país inventado: Un paseo nostálgico par Chile. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 291 pp. ISBN: 0-06-054568-2
Guillerrnoprieto, Alma. Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution. Trans. Esther Allen. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. 221 pp. ISBN: 0-375-42093-2
It seems odd to speak in the same breath of Isabel Allende and Alma Guillerrnoprieto. Like the novels of Stephen King, Allende's breezy fiction beckons to travelers stranded in airports, while Guillermoprieto's angular and meticulous journalism reveals Latin America to readers of The New Yorker. Yet the recently published memoirs of these two notably successful Latin American women writers-Allende's Mi país inventado (2003) and Guillermoprieto's Dancing with Cuba (2004)-are both valuable additions to Latin American writings about the self. The two books share a surprising array of traits.
During the last fifteen years Latin America has produced a spate of eloquent autobiographical works as the Boom writers, facing old age, made personal remembrance a vehicle for narrative art. El pez en el agua (1993) by Mario Vargas Llosa, Conjeturas sobre la memoria de mi tribu (1996) by José Donoso and Vivir para contarla (2002) by Gabriel García Márquez are quite dissimilar works. Vargas Llosa interlards reflections about his childhood and youth with an account of his 1990 campaign for Peru's presidency and calls his book "memoirs" because of its public cast. Donoso, on the other hand, gives us "conjectures," family lore whose veracity he winkingly undercuts. All three of the male Boom writers, however, set out to record the forces and events that shaped their personalities and enabled them to become fine writers. Allende and Guillermoprieto, in contrast, deflect our attention from the story of their learning their authorial craft. Although neither writer stints on intimate detail, Mi pais inventado and Dancing with Cuba are less autobiographies than memoirs of women who have lived through compelling times. Though Allende does assert that without the 1973 coup and her forced exile from Chile she would never have written fiction, El pais inventado portrays not so much Allende herself as the Chile she recalls. If Allende plumbs her own experience, she does so to evoke-and to restore for herself-her homeland in the decade leading...