The fictional del Valle family first featured in 1985’s The House of the Spirits, the debut bestseller that launched Isabel Allende’s literary career.
Now, with her 18th novel, the Chilean-American writer has come full circle – returning to the country she fled more than 50 years ago, and the home of the family that began it all.
“I felt like I had unfinished business in Chile,” our newest del Valle heroine explains in words that might be the author’s own. “I was pulled between nostalgia … and something else I couldn’t name, something stronger than my usual curiosity, a kind of urgent calling.”
For Allende, a sense of urgency wouldn’t be surprising. At 82, she is, she admits, “nearing the end of my existence”. Born in Peru to Chilean parents, she was working as a journalist in Chile in 1973 when her father’s cousin, President Salvador Allende, was assassinated. Her prolific writing career began in exile more than a decade later, but Chile has remained her literary and spiritual home – and this latest novel stays true to form. My Name is Emilia del Valle is another Allende love song to Chile and its people, delivered with her characteristic flare and just a touch of wistfulness.
The Emilia of the novel’s title is the illegitimate daughter of an Irish nun and an absent del Valles aristocrat, raised in San Francisco’s rough Mission District in the second half of the 19th century. Her mother’s determined efforts to claim a del Valle inheritance for her daughter come to nothing, but Emilia grows into a young woman with survival plans of her own. She begins her working life as a dime novelist and then, as Allende herself once did, as an underpaid columnist for one of the city’s newspapers.
“It opened the world for me,” she says. “I was interested in everything.”
In 1891, Emilia further defies social norms to travel to Chile, where she reports on the country’s developing civil war for an American newspaper. Under the supposed care of a male colleague, she receives a crash course on Chilean history, politics and the frontline horrors of warfare. She also meets her now remorseful (and poverty-stricken) father, falls in love with her minder colleague and, unsurprisingly, finds her calling as a writer.
It’s a lot to pack in, but Allende is a master storyteller, deftly blending historical research with the fictional lives of her characters. In one sense, Emilia’s coming-of-age story is classic fairy tale: love and hope blossom, despite some clunky bedroom moments, “in this faraway land at the foot of the volcanoes”. But the enchantment is more than offset by the novel’s chilling’s backdrop – Allende paints a candid picture of a society, rich in culture and history, that is irreversibly divided and at war with itself.
Brutal Chilean civil war battles are recounted in confronting detail: Emilia reports from alongside overwhelmed government foot soldiers at the Battle of Concòn and, later, from blood-soaked hospitals after the Battle of La Placilla. “Everyman was his own story,” she says, “and thousands would never get to tell theirs. It was my job to collect the dispersed fragments of those tales … Nothing I write can come close to the reality of it.”
Ultimately, this tale – potentially the last for the del Valle franchise – is as much Allende’s as it is Emilia’s. The parallels between the older author and her young narrator are too numerous to be coincidental, their voices and passions almost indistinguishable.
“I belong to this landscape,” Emilia says of the troubled ancestral home they share. “This magical place holds my most ancient roots.”
My Name is Emilia del Valle, by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury, $36.99), is out now.
