Polymath Books: Isabel Allende

Monday, December 20, 2010

Isabel Allende

The other day, the San Francisco Chronicle listed a "best of 2010" list that focused on Bay Area authors. Of the books, Island Beneath the Sea, by Isabel Allende. In this novel about a slave in what is now Haiti, Allende creates a unique, accessible entry point to histories that deserve to be told. Read that complete list here. Wikipedia's introduction to the article on the author, this way:

Isabel Allende Llona (born 2 August 1942) is a Chilean writer with American citizenship.[1] Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) (1982) and City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias) (2002), which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author".[2] In 2010 she received Chile's National Literature Prize.[3] In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[4] Allende's novels are sometimes based upon her own personal experiences and often pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to teach literature. Allende adopted American citizenship in 2003 and has lived in California with her husband since 1989.

The same Wikipedia entry contains a section on the criticisms that author Allende has received over the years.

Despite or perhaps because of her commercial success and "being compared to Gabriel García Márquez," Allende has been the subject of negative criticism from other authors and literary critics — among them Roberto Bolaño.[27] In an article published in Entre paréntesis, Bolaño writes that Allende's literature is anemic and compares it to a person on his deathbed.[28] Bolaño has been one of her harshest critics, saying that it is to give her credit to call her a writer and that she is rather a "writing machine".[29] Literary critic Harold Bloom concurs with Bolaño that Allende is a bad writer, and adds that she only reflects a determinate period and that afterwards everybody will have forgotten her.[29][30] Of Bolaño, Allende said to El Clarín that she is honoured to be represented by him as a Chilean, although she remembered Bolaño regarded her as trash.[31] In the same interview, Allende recognises that she has rarely had good criticism in Chile and that Chilean intellectuals "detest" her. Novelist Gonzalo Contreras says that "she commits a grave error, to confuse the commercial success with literary quality".[32] Allende disagrees with these assessments of her, and she has also been quoted as saying: The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing. There was a review of my last book in one American paper by a professor of Latin American studies and he attacked me personally for the sole reason that I sold a lot of books. That is unforgivable.[33] Alternatively, it has been noted[by whom?] that "Allende's impact not only on Latin American literature but also on world literature cannot be overestimated."[19] The Los Angeles Times has called Allende "a genius,"[19] and she has received many international awards, including the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize,[19] granted to writers "who have contributed to the beauty of the world."[19] She has recently been called a "literary legend" by Latino Leaders Magazine, which in its 2007 article named Allende as the third most influential Latino leader in the world.[19]

Find that Wikipedia article, here. She was also a speaker at TED.