Isabel Allende - Literary Career

Literary Career

Beginning in 1967, Allende was on the editorial staff for Paula magazine, and from 1969 to 1974 for the children's magazine Mampato, where she later was the editor. She published two children's stories, La Abuela Panchita (Grandmother Panchita) and Lauchas y Lauchones, as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita. She also worked in Chilean television production for channels 7 (humorous programs) and 13 from 1970 to 1974. As a journalist, she once sought an interview with Pablo Neruda, a notable Chilean poet. While Neruda accepted the interview, he told her that she had too much imagination to be a journalist and should be a novelist instead. He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form. She did so, and this became her first published book. In 1973, Allende's play El Embajador played in Santiago, a few months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.

In Allende's time in Venezuela, she was a freelance journalist for El Nacional in Caracas from 1976 to 1983 and an administrator of the Marrocco School in Caracas from 1979 to 1983.

When Allende, in exile in 1981, received a phone call that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death, she sat down to write him a letter and thereby "keep him alive, at least in spirit." She started writing him a letter that later evolved into a book manuscript, The House of the Spirits (1982); the intent of this work was to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. The book was rejected by numerous Latin American publishers, but finally the novel was published in Spain. The book soon ran into more than two dozen editions in Spanish, and was translated into a score of languages. The book was a great success; Allende was compared to Gabriel García Márquez as an author of the style known as magical realism.

Allende's books have since become known for their vivid storytelling. Although Allende is often lumped together with the literary style of magical realism, her works often display elements of post-Boom literature, and as such her style cannot be described as purely adhering to magical realism. Allende also holds to a very methodical literary routine. She writes using a computer, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. "I always start on 8 January", Allende stated; "a tradition she began in 1981 with a letter she wrote to her dying grandfather that would become the groundwork for her first novel, The House of the Spirits."

Allende's book Paula (1995) is a memoir of her childhood in Santiago, Chile and the following years she spent in exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter, who suffered from porphyria--a metabolic disorder that is rarely fatal. In 1991, an error in medication resulted in severe brain damage and left Paula in a persistent vegetative state. But months passed at Paula's bedside before Allende learned that a hospital mishap had caused irreversible brain damage. Allende had her moved to a hospital in California where she died on 6 December 1992. The book, as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as the chronicle of Paula's death, is a best seller in the U.S., Latin America and Europe.

Allende's novels have been translated from Spanish into over 30 languages and sold more than 56 million copies. There are three movies based on her novels currently in production — Aphrodite, Eva Luna and Gift for a Sweetheart. Her 2008 book, The Sum of Our Days is a memoir. It focuses on her recent life with her immediate family, which includes her grown son, Nicolás; second husband, William Gordon; and several grandchildren. A novel set in New Orleans was published in 2010, The Island Beneath the Sea. In 2011 came El Cuaderno de Maya ("Maya's Notebook"), a novel in which the setting alternates between Berkeley, California, and Chiloé in Chile.