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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.
