"And of Clay Are We Created" combines simplicity and great complexity in the account of a volcanic eruption during which a village and its possessions, some 2, 000 inhabitants, and uncounted animals are buried under ice and snow, mud, and other debris. The threads that connect the protagonists of the stories are their vulnerability to social pressures and their ability to survive, always with love or resistance to misconstrued love, ingenuity, and generosity as the sources of their strength. The narrator constructs her stories for her newscaster lover Rolf Carlé as temporary protection against and distraction from the realities he must report daily. Taken together, the two books reward the reader with correspondences between characters and events that are presented in fictional form but that are clearly related to patterns of Latin America's contemporary political and social history. Since 1988 she has lived in the United States.Įva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna are set in a country that is unidentified but unmistakably located in Latin American.
But when her grandfather fell dangerously ill in Chile, she began to gather together both personal and political memories, and in 1981 she began to write fiction. This was a dividing line in Allende's life, and for two years she wrote nothing.
The ensuing violence threatened her family, and they fled to Venezuela. During a military coup against the socialist government in 1973, her uncle, President Salvador Allende Gossens, was assassinated. Eva Luna, the narrator, is a chronicler of her life and times, as in many respects Allende herself has been.Ī native of Chile born in Peru in 1942, Allende became a popular journalist and broadcaster. The two books complement each other as narratives of a Scheherazade character whose storytelling saves and sustains herself and others. Because of space limitations 24 of Isabel Allende's stories, including "And of Clay Are We Created" "De barro estanos hechos"), that were originally intended for inclusion in Eva Luna were later published separately in The Stories of Eva Luna ( Cuentos de Eva Luna).
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