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Antonomasia's Reviews > Eva Luna
Eva Luna
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by
Antonomasia's review
bookshelves: latin-american, women-in-translation, decade-1980s, contemp-alevel-texts, hispanosphere, chile, el, 2019
Jun 12, 2019
bookshelves: latin-american, women-in-translation, decade-1980s, contemp-alevel-texts, hispanosphere, chile, el, 2019
The first book I’ve read by Isabel Allende, and she reminds me of Neil Gaiman: mesmerising popular storytelling at its best.
Eva Luna is a novel from the 1980s, and as such its use of stereotypes sometimes falls below standards now expected in the literary world, but the characters were so grand and involving that they often felt more like archetype than stereotype.
The unnamed fictional country in which Eva lives seems designed to take in as much as possible of the northern half of South America: tropical, Caribbean, oil rich (Venezuela?), vastly forested (Brazil?), but also containing part of the Andes.
Some of the sexuality in the novel - scenarios which female characters enjoy but which, if they had been written by a man would now be dismissed as male fantasies - made me think of an idea mooted a few months ago by a GR friend, that contemporary left & literary discussion of sex has become so focused on avoidance of harm and on power analysis that it’s almost forgotten about pleasure.
Eva Luna seems to be a lightly-metafictional telenovela in a book (albeit I’ve never seen a telenovela, and not watched a soap episode for maybe 15 years). Allende, through her heroine, who appears to be the same age, writes about what it feels like to have so many stories to tell (and she was not wrong, as her prolific output and sales continue now, even if she gets less press coverage than in the 80s and 90s). The semi-fairytale/magic-realist story of the heroine, the strong-willed and gifted daughter of a servant, and her remarkable vagaries of fortune, could be seen as showing too much good luck compared with most real people in such circumstances - but it is also, like the fairytale, a type of story which provides hopes and dreams which may sustain during drab or difficult lives.
I’m always glad to discover that I actually like the work of a popular author, one who writes well enough that I feel no need to make excuses for the style (as I might with, for example, a lot of genre crime). I find it useful to like writers whose books are ubiquitous to borrow or buy, and whom a lot of people have heard of. Isabel Allende can be added to that list.
Eva Luna is a novel from the 1980s, and as such its use of stereotypes sometimes falls below standards now expected in the literary world, but the characters were so grand and involving that they often felt more like archetype than stereotype.
The unnamed fictional country in which Eva lives seems designed to take in as much as possible of the northern half of South America: tropical, Caribbean, oil rich (Venezuela?), vastly forested (Brazil?), but also containing part of the Andes.
Some of the sexuality in the novel - scenarios which female characters enjoy but which, if they had been written by a man would now be dismissed as male fantasies - made me think of an idea mooted a few months ago by a GR friend, that contemporary left & literary discussion of sex has become so focused on avoidance of harm and on power analysis that it’s almost forgotten about pleasure.
Eva Luna seems to be a lightly-metafictional telenovela in a book (albeit I’ve never seen a telenovela, and not watched a soap episode for maybe 15 years). Allende, through her heroine, who appears to be the same age, writes about what it feels like to have so many stories to tell (and she was not wrong, as her prolific output and sales continue now, even if she gets less press coverage than in the 80s and 90s). The semi-fairytale/magic-realist story of the heroine, the strong-willed and gifted daughter of a servant, and her remarkable vagaries of fortune, could be seen as showing too much good luck compared with most real people in such circumstances - but it is also, like the fairytale, a type of story which provides hopes and dreams which may sustain during drab or difficult lives.
I’m always glad to discover that I actually like the work of a popular author, one who writes well enough that I feel no need to make excuses for the style (as I might with, for example, a lot of genre crime). I find it useful to like writers whose books are ubiquitous to borrow or buy, and whom a lot of people have heard of. Isabel Allende can be added to that list.
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Reading Progress
August 10, 2018
– Shelved
May 30, 2019
–
Started Reading
June 12, 2019
–
Finished Reading
