The 3 best books of Isabel Allende

The Chilean writer Isabel Allende he manages as he wants one of the main virtues or gifts that every writer yearns to achieve throughout his entire career: empathy. The characters of Isabel Allende are vivid images from the inside out. We connect with all of them from the soul. And from there, from the subjective internal forum, we contemplate the world under the prism that the author is interested in showing in order to be more convincing, more emotional or even more critical if she touches ...

So, friend, you are warned. Putting yourself to read any of the novels of the queen of letters in Spanish will mean a mutation, an osmosis, a mimicry towards other lives, those of the characters in her novels. It happens like this, you start by listening to them walk near you, then you notice how they breathe, you end up deciphering their scent and seeing their gestures. In the end you end up inside their skin and start living for them.

And in short, that is empathy, learning to see with different eyes. And as I have always said, this is one of the greatest values ​​in literature. It is not a question of believing yourself wiser, but of knowing how to understand others. Separate singular dissertations on work of Isabel Allende, I think there is nothing left for me to say except to present my three recommended novels strongly.

Top 3 recommended novels of Isabel Allende

The city of beasts

Do you want to delve into the deep Amazon? It may be the only place on this planet where you can find something authentic. (It could also occur in the abyssal zone, but we can't get there yet).

If, in addition, those who take you are Alexander and Nadia, you will enjoy the literary trip of your life, which sometimes is more than actually traveling to the end of the world. Alexander Cold is a fifteen-year-old American boy who goes to the Amazon with his grandmother Kate, a journalist specializing in travel.

The expedition goes deep into the jungle in search of a strange gigantic beast. Together with his travel companion, Nadia Santos, and a centennial indigenous shaman, Alex will discover an amazing world and together they will live a great adventure.

The already known universe of Isabel Allende expands on The City of Beasts with new elements of magical realism, adventure and nature. The young protagonists, Nadia and Alexander, enter the unexplored Amazon jungle, leading the reader by the hand on a non-stop journey through a mysterious territory where the boundaries between reality and dreams are blurred, where men and gods are confused, where spirits walk hand in hand with the living.

the city of beasts, Isabel Allende

The House of the Spirits

It was not bad to begin with, but not bad at all ... so that we are going to fool ourselves, this, his first novel, ended up being a totem work, taken to the cinema and read in countless countries around the world.

A deep and emotional work that penetrates all the great instincts of the human being, ambition and tenderness, decadence and vainglory, hatred and hopelessness, all in its right dose to end up being a flood of humanity in abundance. The story of a family and its generational transition. The lustrous years past and the present as an echo echoing through corridors and shadows.

The inheritances that go beyond the material, the mysteries and pending debts, brotherhood and friendship in the company of resentment and guilt. Everything that we are in our inner circle ends up reflected in this novel.

The geographic environment in deep Latin America is a plot necessity to accompany the transit of the intense lives of its characters. The society in political distress, the dictatorship and the freedoms. Everything, this novel has it, simply, everything. 40th anniversary edition:

The island under the sea

For a slave in Saint-Domingue at the end of the XNUMXth century, Zarité had had a lucky star: at the age of nine she was sold to Toulouse Valmorain, a wealthy landowner, but she did not experience either the depletion of the cane plantations or suffocation and el sufrimiento de los trapiches, porque siempre fue una esclava doméstica. Su bondad natural, fortaleza de espíritu y honradez le permitieron compartir los secretos y la espiritualidad que ayudaban a sobrevivir a los suyos, los esclavos, y conocer las miserias de los amos, los blancos.

Zarité became the center of a microcosm that was a reflection of the world of the colony: the master Valmorain, his fragile Spanish wife and their sensitive son Maurice, the wise Parmentier, the military man Relais and the mulatto courtesan Violette, Tante Rose, the healer, Gambo, the handsome rebel slave... and other characters in a cruel conflagration that would end up devastating their land and throwing them far from it.

Being taken by her master to New Orleans, Zarité began a new stage in which she would achieve her greatest aspiration: freedom. Beyond pain and love, submission and independence, of her wishes and those who had imposed her throughout her life, Zarité could contemplate her with serenity and conclude that she had had a good star.

The island under the sea, Isabel Allende

Other books by Isabel Allende...

The wind knows my name

History repeats itself with the recalcitrant feeling that if we don't regress, at least we're stuck. Learning from history then seems like a chimera. And the most dramatic experiences are repeated as if an old fear composed a persistent symphony of human existence, from general destiny to the most particular experiences that an author like Isabel Allende it still evokes with necessary tints of hope, despite everything.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is a six-year-old Jewish boy whose father disappears during the Night of Broken Glass, in which his family loses everything. His mother, desperate, gets him a place on a train that will take him from Nazi Austria to England. Samuel begins a new stage with his faithful violin and with the weight of loneliness and uncertainty, which will always accompany him in his long life.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, seven-year-old Anita Díaz boards another train with her mother to escape imminent danger in El Salvador and go into exile in the United States. Her arrival coincides with a ruthless new government policy that separates her from her mother at the border. Alone and scared, far from everything familiar, Anita takes refuge in Azabahar, the magical world that only exists in her imagination. Meanwhile, Selena Durán, a young social worker, and Frank Angileri, a successful lawyer, fight to reunite the girl with her mother and offer her a better future.

In The wind knows my name past and present are intertwined to tell the drama of uprooting and the redemption of solidarity, compassion and love. A current novel about the sacrifices that parents must sometimes make for their children, about the surprising ability of some children to survive violence without stopping dreaming, and about the tenacity of hope, which can shine even in the darkest moments. dark.

The wind knows my name

Beyond winter

I have a great memory of this book by Isabel Allende by the circumstances in which it was read. And it is that reality and fiction are not so alien, not even from a reader's prism in which what happens to him matches what happens in the novel with other impressions and other notions.

So maybe some other previous book could occupy this third place, but circumstances rule and this reading was soaked with positivity despite its background, with hope despite its edges ...

It is squeaky, and in a way it also looks like this in the novel, how globalization ends up being a fiction for humans without humans, a kind of perfect circle around the planet, where what circulates freely is anything but people .

Fewer states to control the economy, but more states to control people. America is the summon of this paradox, and there we meet the characters of this committed, realistic and certainly conscientious novel.

beyond winter, Isabel Allende

Long sea petal

Most of the great stories, epic and transformative, transcendental and revolutionary but always very human, start from necessity in the face of imposition, rebellion or exile in defense of ideals. Almost everything that is worth telling happens when the human being takes that leap over the abyss to clearly see that everything feels more relevant with the support of the possible conquest. You cannot live more than one life, as I already pointed out kundera in his way of describing our existence as a sketch for an empty work. But contradicting the Czech genius a bit, there remains the testimony of the great adventurers in the face of imposition, and even tragedy, as the way of living with such intensity that it seems that one lives at least twice.

And to this he has put nothing more and nothing less than Isabel Allende, recovering his compatriot Neruda, who, upon seeing the bay of Valparaíso with the thousands of Spanish exiles near their new destinations to be built, transcribed the vision as: "that long petal of sea and snow."

It is what has the epic of survival. The arrival in Valparaiso in 1939, from Spain practically defeated by Franco, supposed a finished mission for the poet. More than 2.000 Spaniards concluded a journey towards hope there, freed from the fear of authoritarianism that was beginning to emerge between the coasts of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Those chosen for Allende's narration are Victor Dalamu and Roser Bruguera. With whom we start the departure from the small French town of Pauillac aboard the mythical boat Winnipeg.

But not everything is easy, the necessary escape from your origins produces uprooting wherever you go. And despite the good reception in Chile (with their reluctance in certain sectors, of course), Victor and Roser feel that unease of life lost thousands of kilometers away. The lives of the protagonists and the future of a Chile that was also experiencing its tensions in a world condemned to World War II, a conflict in which Chile would end up getting wet, impelled by pressure from the United States. The Chile that already suffered its own in the First World War, still devastated by the earthquake of that same 1939.

The role of the exiles was short-lived and they soon had to find a new life for themselves. The hindrance of the loss of origins always weighs down. But once the new site is found, the same begins to be seen with a strangeness that can break to either side.

long sea petal, Isabel Allende

Violeta

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first child in a family of five boisterous siblings. From the beginning his life will be marked by extraordinary events, as the shock waves of the Great War are still felt when the Spanish flu reaches the shores of his native South American country, almost at the exact moment of his birth.

Thanks to the clairvoyance of the father, the family will emerge unscathed from this crisis to face a new one, when the Great Depression disrupts the elegant urban life that Violeta has known until now. His family will lose everything and will be forced to retire to a wild and remote part of the country. There Violeta will come of age and will have her first suitor ...

In a letter addressed to a person whom she loves above all others, Violeta recalls devastating love disappointments and passionate romances, moments of poverty as well as prosperity, terrible losses and immense joys. Some of the great events in history will shape her life: the struggle for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics.

Seen through the eyes of a woman with unforgettable passion, determination and humor that sustains her through a turbulent life, Isabel Allende gives us, once again, a furiously inspiring and deeply emotional epic tale.

Violet, by Isabel Allende

Women of my soul

Knowing by heart the way to the source of inspiration, Isabel Allende in this work he turns into the existential gibberish of maturity where we all return to what forged our identity. Something that strikes me as very natural and timely, in tune with a recent interview that I read about Isabel in which there was a sense of that point of beautiful melancholy, of longing that only in the Prose writers with Allende's lyrical gift can be sublimated in novels, autobiographies or that kind of hybrid that each one achieves when recounting his life.

For this task, the author changes one of her titles currently more in vogue thanks to the homonymous series "Inés del alma mía" and leads us to a vision in tune with that of Inés herself rediscovering the world, the new world. Because the vision of a writer must always look to new horizons, those offered by each age.

Isabel Allende dives into her memory and offers us an exciting book about her relationship with feminism and the fact of being a woman, while claiming that adult life must be lived, felt and enjoyed with full intensity.

En Women of my soul The great Chilean author invites us to accompany her on this personal and emotional journey where she reviews her connection with feminism from childhood to today. He remembers some essential women in his life, such as his long-awaited Panchita, Paula or the agent Carmen Balcells; to relevant writers such as Virginia Woolf or Margaret Atwood; to young artists who agglutinate the rebellion of their generation or, among many others, to those anonymous women who have suffered violence and who, full of dignity and courage, get up and move forward ...

They are the ones who inspire him so much and have accompanied him so much throughout his life: his women of the soul. Finally, he also reflects on the #MeToo movement -which he supports and celebrates-, on the recent social upheavals in his country of origin and, of course, on the new situation that we are experiencing globally with the pandemic. All this without losing that unmistakable passion for life and insisting that, regardless of age, there is always time for love.

Women of my soul
4.9/5 - (19 votes)

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