Isabel Allende did not come to Popejoy Hall Wednesday night to address UNM's resident literary snobs.
"I never studied literature," she said Wednesday in an interview with the Daily Lobo. "And frankly, I don't care for the way literature is taught in schools. I am trying to reach a broad audience when I speak in public and my advice to them would be to read, read, read and forget the analysis and criticism. Read like you make love, for God's sake! You don't need a manual for that."
Onstage
Decked out in all the splendor of a Latin American diva - peach-colored velvet, no less - Allende's sometimes cocky, often self-deprecating sense of humor was on full display. Allende was a welcome installment in the UNM 21st Century Speakers Series.
"My life has been about losses, abandonment, separation and many good things, too," she said. "I expect things to go wrong, but I'm not completely neurotic."
She told the half-capacity crowd at Popejoy about her life as an immigrant, as a political exile and as an "adapted American." She discussed her family, her roots, her fiery love life and her second husband at length.
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"I moved here out of pure lust for a man," she said. "Chilean women don't move for anything else."
But most poignantly, she talked about the profound effect writing has had on her life.
"Living in America and being a writer have made me the hyperbolic, flamboyant bitch that I am," she said with a broad smile.
Magical realism
Allende said she feels "50/50" about critics and readers identifying her with the magical realism movement.
"Most people in the '70s and '80s identified all Latin American authors with [magical realism] and they just haven't been able to move away from that," she said.
The first of her 13 novels, The House of Spirits, which brought her worldwide critical acclaim, is perhaps her book most strongly identified with the movement. But she is hesitant to categorize herself or her work.
"I have dreams, premonitions and such in my books, but those can be just as real as they are magic."
Her most recent work, a trilogy aimed at a young adult audience, shows a return to her more surrealistic past.
"These books are for young people, of course there's 'magic' in them."
History and process
Born in Per£ in 1942, Allende moved to Chile as a young child. Her family history is no secret. Her uncle Salvador was the first socialist president of Chile, only to be assassinated on Sept. 11, 1973, in a military coup. That event shaped her not only as a person, but as a writer as well.
She spent her formative writing years as a journalist, which accounts for her every-man, or in her case, every-woman approach. The precision and taut feel she brings to her current craft can also be traced to those journalistic roots.
She said that writing for newspapers and magazines about "everything except politics and sports," taught her to create tension and develop tone, not to mention strengthen research skills and the ability to work with others.
"Journalism is the greatest training," she said. "It's like going to war - you're out there in the trenches. You have to create an emotion in 800 words or less and with no more than three adjectives."
But since early childhood, it was fiction that appealed most to Allende. A lifelong fascination with perceptions of reality, how they differ from person to person, is at the core of who she is. And her own perception of truth, or a lack of truth, is one of the things that drives her as a writer.
"When I was little and I told stories, I was called a liar," she said. "Now, I am called a narrator. What is a lie? I've written memoir before, which is supposed to be a truthful account, but it is fiction too. Writers choose what to tell and what to omit. Life, everything, is so personal, so subjective."
In addition to her 13 novels, Allende published a collection of short stories, The Stories of Eva Luna, in 1991. She considers it some of the most difficult work of her career and, sadly, "publisher un-friendly."
Poetry is the one genre Allende has steered clear of her entire career. It is an ear for music, she said, that is just not one of her gifts.
"Poetry goes straight to the soul," she said. "It has such a sense of immediacy. Poets say in six lines what I can only say in 600 pages."
A transplanted American
Though she may shy away from writing styles that do not suit her or her publishers, Allende has no problem tackling touchy subject matter. She is an unabashed feminist and as politically outspoken as any man or woman has been in the last 100 years.
Since moving to the United States in 1987, she has watched the global image of Americans steadily deteriorate, she said, though she does consider herself a "proud American citizen." She also spoke candidly about the war in Iraq:
"America will win this war. There is no way a country like Iraq can stand up against the mighty United States - but that's the point!"
"This country has become more and more arrogant," she said. "It's this messianic attitude that Americans are better than everyone else. The idea of fascism starts with that," she said.
Allende said that speaking on college campuses gives her a chance to take the pulse of her readers and that the older she gets, the younger her readership seems to be. She offered a bit of advice for bourgeoning writers:
"People wait for inspiration because writing is stressful and scary. We are confronted with the loneliness of our own minds. . .Just write one good page every single day. You'll have 10 bad ones for every good one, but in a year, you'll have a book."
