Something to Look Forward to at Next Year’s Bookworm Literary Festival:

After the Mo Yan talk or one of the other events, the owner of the Bookworm, Alexandra Pearson, passed on some very good news regarding next year’s international literary festival. They’re apparently talking to the Chilean Embassy about sponsoring a visit by Isabelle Allende (伊莎贝尔啊连德) to the 2010 Literary Festival (see the above photo).

Allende is one of my favorite novelists. She has been hailed as a “genius” by the LOS ANGELES TIMES and is the first woman to receive the Gabriela Mistral Order. Her novels and other books have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold 51 million copies worldwide. I’m thus going to take a quick break from discussing things China-related and sieze the opportunity to write about one of my favorite individuals on the planet.

Readers who are familiar with recent Chilean (智利) history certainly know about Salvador Allende (see the photo above). For those who don’t, he was Latin America’s first democratically elected Socialist President. To be sure, Allende came to power in 1970 under rather special circumstances. He won a plurality of the vote in a three-way contest—the non-Socialist vote was split between the centrist and right candidates.

The Chilean Congress then chose him as President after some rather complex negotiations and following the CIA-backed kidnapping and assassination of General René Schneider. Schneider felt that Chile’s military should uphold the country’s democratic constitution and believed that the Congress should, as it had in the past, select the top vote winner. Popular disgust over Schneider’s murder had the immediate impact of getting the Congress to select Allende as President. However, over the long run, Schneider’s assassination paved the way for the 1973 military coup (军事政变) and Pinochet dictatorship (专政).

Of course this coup was actively supported by the Nixon Administration. Indeed, by all accounts, Nixon (尼克松) went ballistic over Allende’s election, referring to him as “that SOB” to the American Ambassador to the country, Edward Korry. Allende’s election also prompted this notable comment from Henry Kissinger (基辛格): “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.”

Thus the Nixon Administration exerted considerable economic pressure on Chile following Allende’s election. These measures included cutting off credits and trade and funding the opposition, notably the crippling 1973 truckers’ strike. Such actions certainly added to the problems created by Allende’s populist economic policies, which spawned high inflation, and the pressure exerted by his radical supporters for an accelerated socialist transformation of the country. All of this polarized Chile and alienated the middle classes. After the coup occurred, Kissinger proudly boasted, “We set the limits of diversity.”

I mention Salvador Allende because he and Isabelle Allende are indeed related. The novelist’s father, the Chilean diplomat Tomas Allende—he served as Chile’s ambassador to Peru—was Salvador Allende’s cousin, making Isabelle his first cousin removed. Isabelle mainly grew up outside of Chile. After marrying her first husband, she lived in and outside of Chile, working for the UN, doing free-lance journalism, and translating English language romantic novels into Spanish, including ones written by Barbara Cartland. Allende was fired from that last job because she changed the stories in these novels in ways that turned their heroines into stronger and more independent women.

The military coup, which led to arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of Chileans, naturally had a great personal impact on Allende. For a brief time, she helped leftist opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship flee from Chile. She had to do this herself after receiving death threats. Allende moved to Venezuela, where she worked as a journalist and wrote her first novel, THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS, which was published in 1982.

This novel tells the story of Trueba family, focusing on three generations of Trueba women. It chronicles their lives in a fictional Latin American country—this place, of course, bears more than a passing resemblance to Chile—from the post-colonial era up through the modern day populist upheavels and military repression. The book certainly has a great deal of Latin American “magical realism” literary style and is also one of the most accessible and easy to read examples of this genre.

THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS became an instant best-seller after it was published. Critics also hailed it as the best Chilean novel of 1982. Thus the work turned Allende overnight into a literary superstar. She then moved to America and became a US citizen in 2003 (she lives with her second husband, an attorney, in California).

Allende’s subsequent novels include OF LOVE AND SHADOWS (1995), which dealt with military rule in Chile. She also wrote a wonderful historical novel, set in both Chile and Gold Rush California, DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE (1999). The legendary Gold Rush bandit, Joaquin Marietta, is more than a minor character in character in this novel, and Allende has an interesting take on this mythic Robin Hood-like figure.

In addition to these novels, I have also read Allende’s big Dickensian Novel in the US, THE INFINITE PLAN (1991) (it’s also a cracking good read!). Alas, I have not had the chance to read her other work—as one of my T-shirts proclaims, “So many books, so little time!” One work that is definitely on my list is, PAULA (1995), which is a memoir of Allende’s childhood and subsequent work as a journalist in Santiago.

This book intrigues me because it is not written as a conventional autobiography. It is rather written as a letter to her daughter, who tragically died in a hospital in Spain. The girl had porphyria and passed away after lapsing into coma, which was caused by botched medication.

I actually had the good fortune to see Isabelle Allende in person many, many years ago, in 1991, and vaguely remember her talking about this book, which she was in the middle of writing at that time. I was then a visiting assistant professor in the Government Department at Cornell University. Every year Cornell University would ask its graduate student association to invite some famous individual—writer, scientist, activist, etc.—to visit the campus and deliver an address.

The guest in 1991 happened to be Isabelle Allende. At that time I had read THE HOUSE SPIRITS and OF LOVE AND SHADOWS. Seeing Allende was a fantastic experience, on a par with seeing Mo Yan, although the setting was a big auditorium, rather than a small and intimate bookstore. She had a very striking kind of Latin beauty and tremendous natural charisma. I persuaded a graduate student friend, who studied Latin American politics, to accompany me to the talk. He was reluctant to go, but then spent the next few days raving about this event.

I thus can hardly wait to see Allende again. If she does indeed come, I’ll rush down to the Bookworm right after the tickets for that and other events go on sale and get a place!

Since this is a post about non-Chinese stuff, there isn’t much Mandarin vocabulary here. As with the previous posts, the Chinese characters used in this post, along with their Romanized spelling (Pinyin) and tones are listed below. A number 1 indicates that the character has a flat tone, a number 2, a rising tone, a number 3, a falling rising tone, a number 4, a falling tone, and a number 5, a neutral tone.

伊莎贝尔啊连德 (yi1sha1bei4 er3a1lian2de2).
智利 (zhi4li4).
军事政变 (jun1shi2zheng4bian4). This literally means “Military (军事) government (政) change (变)”.
专政(zhuan1zheng4). The first character on its own can mean “tyrannical, aribitrary,” as well as “focused, monopolized, and concentrated”. The second character, 政, is the first half of the Chinese word for “government/seat of government” (政府; zheng4fu3).
尼克松 (ni2ke4song1).
基辛格 (ji1xin1ge2).