By Peter Craven
My Name is Emilia Del Valle: It’s bold, it’s contradictory.
FICTION
My Name is Emilia Del Valle
Isabel Allende
Bloomsbury, $32.99
What a strange and dazzling writer Isabel Allende has become. There was a time when the niece of the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, destroyed by Pinochet’s military coup, looked like a straightforward bestseller writer, and it’s true that she’s sold millions of books. But My Name is Emilia Del Valle is not a middlebrow book laced with magical realism: it is a moving and eloquent novel that breaks all the rules but retains its emotional reality, its poignancy and its compelling strangeness.
The heroine, Emilia, is the child of a vengefully tough-minded nun who was seduced by a Chilean playboy. She insists that her daughter keep his name because he owes her, despite her easygoing love for her cherished agnostic stepfather. Early on, we learn that Emilia writes dime novels – under a male name – which breathe a spirit of atrocious vengeance and violence but keep the family going.
One day, she meets the editor of a San Francisco paper and persuades him to take her on as a sort of feature writer (one of the beguiling charms of this novel is that we get examples of her stories on a world of subjects). She goes first class to New York and meets belly dancers and clairvoyants. She loses her virginity to the elder brother of her fellow journalist in California, and he teaches her how to be a considerate lover (though he’s not interested in big-time love per se).
Then she and her fellow reporter head for the civil war in Chile: he as the primary reporter (though he doesn’t speak Spanish) and she, who does, as the background essayist. The war is between the supporters of the loftily aristocratic president, who thinks nothing of whipping people and placing them in the stocks, and a different faction representing the navy rather than the army. The conflict is all about nitrates, and various overseas nations back different sides.
Allende’s latest work has a stupendous, dreamlike quality.Credit: Eric Risberg
Early on, Emilia meets the matriarch of her family, who is a tough woman indeed, and then she meets her biological father, who is ill and harrowed with guilt, imagining he is doomed to an eternity of damnation.
If all of this sounds like a mishmash, it’s part of Allende’s paradoxical steadiness that she can hold the most disparate elements in the palm of her hand.
Her father was a wastrel, but his agonies, both physical and spiritual, are done with great power. He wants to acknowledge Emilia as his legitimate daughter, and there is a startling scene where the matriarch, who has supported him but always despised him, is suddenly tearfully filled with compassion, and the upshot has a weird kind of moral grandeur.
The poet Marianne Moore said poetry was an imaginary garden with real toads in it, and this is uncannily true of how Isabel Allende’s fiction works. It takes a series of unlikelihoods and then invests them with a wholly credible emotional weight and gravity. The war is presented with great savagery. Our heroine works in the field of battle and also as a nurse to the wounded. Impressive figures – a British surgeon, a German nun – suddenly loom like archetypes of goodness.
There is the prospect of imminent execution, and the spirits of the living and the dead come to comfort her. There is the much-anticipated realisation of true love, and then – crazily – there is the journey to see the place bequeathed to her by her hopeless father.
None of it makes overall sense, but all of it has a graphic beauty. This is the realisation of what the dime novels might be. This is the apprehension of dreams that have to reconfigure reality.
My Name is Emilia Del Valle has, cumulatively, a stupendous quality like a dream that makes a deeper sense than the thing it disrupts. If you are patient, it will hurl you into whatever state the author can envisage. Who would have thought a woman who saw her uncle’s best hopes destroyed by Pinochet would write a book so filled with the power of forgiveness, which can at the same time encompass the savagery and blood-drenched hatred of a war-torn world?
This book is an enchantment. It’s bold, it’s contradictory. It turns everything on its head, and at the same time, it carries conviction. It’s a tremendous bit of yarn spinning, but it transcends its frailties. How strange that a book of such confusions should feel so strong and brave.
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