The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

 

In The Stories of Eva Luna, Isabel Allende presents a collection of stories ostensibly told by Ralph Carlé’s partner. Ralph is a television journalist and features in the last story of the set when he tries to free a young girl trapped by mud after a landslide.

Before the prologue in which Ralph Carlé asks to be told stories, Isabel Allende refers to Sheherezade of Arabian Nights fame. Her task was to keep the Grand Vizier entertained all night until dawn so that she might survive the telling, unlike all who had previously been similarly tasked. A footnote informs the reader that Sheherezade did indeed succeed in her quest. “At this moment in her story, Sheherezade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent.” This surely implies that a woman with a gift of language might just escape the nightly attentions of a man. Such attentions feature large throughout the The Stories of Eva Luna and all the usual and perhaps inevitable consequences follow to form the central focus of almost every one of these tales.

These stories are written in the magical realism style of much Latin American fiction. The language is quite dense, but often not as dense as the fusillade of events that attach themselves to the lives of these people in this provincial, quiet and often rather boring town. The lives described in the stories, however, are surely never dull. Indeed, so full of detail are they that these short stories would be difficult to digest as suggested over a single night.

Try, for instance, this passage about an English couple. “The large headquarters of Sheepbreeders Ltd rose up from the sterile plane like a forgotten cake; it was surrounded by an absurd lawn and defended against the depredations of the climate by the superintendent’s wife, who could not resign herself to live outside the heart of the British Empire and continued to dress for solitary dinners with her husband, a phlegmatic gentleman buried beneath his pride in obsolete traditions.” There are many who might understand something general in this particular description.

I read these stories in a first English paperback edition, and, it has to be said, there were several misprints. When reading magical realism, however, one is never sure if the misprint might just have been intended. On board ship, for instance, Maria just might have been interested in her desk. “Several days after the tragedy, Maria emerged with unsteady step to take the air on the desk for the first time. It was a warm night, and an unsettling odour of seaweed, shellfish, and sunken ships rose from the ocean, entered her nostrils, and raced through her veins with the effort of an earthquake. She found herself staring at the horizon, her mind a blank and her skin tingling from her heels to the back of her neck, when she heard an insistent whistle; she half-turned and beheld two decks below a dark shadow in the moonlight, signalling into her.”

Local politics aften figures large in the stories. There are corrupt local officials, some honest ones, dictators called benefactors and revolutions, bandits and thieves. There is even a man who maintains his respectability by virtue of the existence of buried gold which, when push comes to shove, is no longer where he put it.

A theme that reemerges several times is the eventual payback by a woman badly treated, misused or merely abused. Some of the twists and turns of plot, nay of lives, are too unexpected to have been imagined. Many of these events would have probably been true, but perhaps not so vividly embroidered. In fact, some of these tales are so densely woven that a reader might want a rest here or there! But they are superb and no doubt better if read in Spanish.

I usually don’t start book reviews with a warning, but this time I have to break the habit of a lifetime and issue one. If you are a Christian, you might find what follows offensive.

The She-Apostle by Glyn Redworth is a tale of self-harm, ideological control, and international terrorism. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when the book is set, the social medium within which the self-harm of especially young women was perpetrated was the Church. The ideological control in question was also perpetrated by the Church, a control so absolute, misguided and complete that individuals often suffered hallucination as a result of the guilt that was heaped upon them by what they were taught. International terrorism, in the case of The She-Apostle, is manifest in the Gunpowder Plot, when a group of ideologically driven fanatics tried to blow up the entire political leadership of a sovereign state, being England under James the First. If this were a review of a contemporary novel, the fact that it featured self-harm promoted by social media, hallucinations and violence, and international terrorism might be merely par for the course. When, as is the case of Glyn Redworth’s book, it is associated with the life of a seventeenth century saint, it may seem strange. It might just be that little has changed in human society in the intervening four hundred years, except, of course, our appreciation of just how brutal life was at that time.

Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza was born in Extremadura into a Spanish nobility that was enjoying the country’s Golden Age. Colonies overseas were disgorging their riches towards the seat of imperial power, the nobility were gobbling up the proceeds and Spanish priests were at work, saving the souls of a whole continent by converting them to Christianity, whilst at the same time sending them to heaven at the double by infecting them with smallpox, influenza, and typhoid. Europe was riven by ideological differences between Catholics and Protestants that to an outsider seem about as consequential as disagreeing about how many angels would fit on a pinhead. If you are a Christian, I accept, angels matter. If you are not, they don’t exist. The evidence, surely, lies on that side, but whenever did the ideologically committed ever trouble themselves with evidence? Unless, of course, it could be twisted into a case against someone who thought differently from oneself…

Born with several silver spoons already in her mouth, Luisa sought solace in faith. She was regularly abused by her guardian, in the name of God, of course, and regularly harmed herself with instruments of torture. Eventually, she adopted a life of frugality, continued to self-harm, and to pioneer a life of religious devotion that was personal rather than institutionalized. She never became a nun. She also decided to free the English from the manacles of Protestantism and, soon after the armada had failed to do the same by force, moved to England to follow her mission.

Glyn Redworth’s The She-Apostle is more than a biography of Luisa. It perhaps stops short of being a conventional hagiography. The author does describe the personal and societal consequences of Luisa’s campaign to promote Roman Catholicism in Protestant England, but quite often a reader might feel that the author stopped short of delivering the criticisms of her actions that he himself felt. Luisa may indeed have sought martyrdom, but her crime in the end was to steal the remains of already butchered Roman Catholics, put to death by a state that arrogated absolute power because of the terrorism they threatened.

As a reminder, it must be pointed out that the method of choice by which the just imposed their will on dissenters was as follows. “Hung, drawn and quartered” might sound like it might apply to a Spanish ham. But in that age, it meant being hung by the neck until you are almost dead. Then you were cut down and disembowelled, your intestines being trailed onto a fire as you watched. Then your arms, legs and head were cut off and then the final ignominy was that your torso was cut into quarters, each part of you destined for a different resting place. The idea, of course, was ideologically driven in that admission to heaven needed intact remains, so once quartered, a person was to be damned forever.

Louisa, herself, was indeed arrested for stealing the remains of executed Catholics, although she herself died eventually in bed. She wanted to pass on the dried-out flesh and bones of the martyred as relics to consecrate holy places. But she was spared the ignominy of the gallows and axe so there was no obvious martyrdom for her. Glyn Redworth’s book, though superficially adulatory, does give a vivid portrayal of the political and social life of the time, and as such it is worth reading. For a believer, I suppose it provides joyous example of a pious life. For a nonbeliever, like me, it portrays the shockingly violent absurdity of the irrational.