Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits

Rating:
Summary: Fine biography of a great story-teller.
Review: The simplest description of this book is that it is a short biography of renowned hispanic writer Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. It is based on a series of taped interviews between Zapata and Allende made at Zapata's instigation after many years of cajoling, following the beginning of their friendship in the 1980s. It was Zapata, a professor of Latin American literature at San Jose State University, who convinced Isabel, then a new best-selling author living in Venezuela and also newly divorced, to include California in a lecture tour promoting her popular novels in the USA for the first time. In their first meeting at San Jose it was Celia who introduced Isabel to the man who would later become Isabel's second husband, William Gordon. This in turn led to Isabel moving her home from Venezuela to California. The interviews that became this book occurred at regular intervals over a whole year in a rented hotel room near San Francisco Airport, half way between San Jose and Isabel's new home in San Rafael. In one interview Isabel says, "Why do I write? Because I am filled with stories that demand to be told, because the words are choking me, because I like and need to write, because if I don't write my soul dries up and I die." I like Allende's books, and I like her personally even more after reading this compelling biography. It's an easy read, and also includes a helpful chronology of Isabel's complicated life from 1942 to 2002.