The premise of this book is a sad one, given that it started as a letter to her gravely ill daughter Paula. About her grandparents, Tata and Memé, she says, “I believe they lived in irreconcilable worlds and at fleeting moments loved one another with painful tenderness and secret passion.” As connected as they are to the events around them, Allende also tells the tales of their love for each other. Isabel Allende comes from a family of diplomats and storytellers. Sometimes that felt quite normal and natural, while other times it just felt self-centered. But as Neruda said, Allende is a center of the entire story as she tells it. Next, layer on top some Chilean and Latin American history, and you get the picture. Why don’t you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are virtues.” Exactly so.Īs Allende tells her story, it’s both memoir and the history of her family. You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do, I suspect you’re not beyond fibbing, and when you don’t have news, you invent it. As they talked, he said to her, “My dear child, you must be the worst journalist in the country. In her wide-ranging memoir, Paula, Isabel Allende tells the story of a conversation she had with famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
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