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.