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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Chile Views Through the Lens of Nostalgia, July 19, 2003
The terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, a traumatic day for the United States. In the same month and on the same day (Sept. 11) in 1973, Isabel Allende's Chile experienced its own trauma. On that day almost thirty years ago, a CIA-engineered military coup brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a cousin of Isabel Allende's father, and installed General Augusto Pinochet, a dictator whose reign of terror lasted for 17 years (1973-1990). Isabel Allende has never forgiven Nixon, Kissinger & Co. for what she describes as an arrogant and brutal attack on human rights. Nor was Chile an isolated case of America's bungled foreign policy. "The United States," she Allende, "has had a shameful record of overthrowing legally elected governments and of supporting tyrannies that would never be tolerated in its own territory: Papa Doc in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, and many others." But the news is not all bad. In Allende's opinion "the United States is beginning to realize that its policy of supporting tyranny does not solve problems--it merely creates new ones." Born in Peru in 1942, Isabel Allende was reared in Santiago, Chile. Her new work, My Invented Country, is a memoir of her life as an exile and immigrant, wanderer and outsider. "I never fit in anywhere," says Allende, "not into my family, my social class, or the religion fate bestowed on me. . . . When I was fifteen, I left the church forever and acquired a horror of religions in general and monotheistic faiths in particular. . . . My religion, should anyone be interested, can be reduced to a simple question: What is the most generous thing one can do in this case?" At age 35, Allende became a divorcee. She then married Willie Gordon, an American lawyer, and now lives in San Francisco. Although far from her homeland, she carries within her a haunting memory of her childhood home, and takes us on a nostalgic, and often painful, journey through Chile. Her essay in memory reveals a love-hate relationship with her native land. On the one hand her comments-- censorious, condemnatory, and caustically critical--reveal a seething fury; on the other hand, she writes with genuine affection for the foibles idiosyncrasies, the virtues and vices, of her people. Although Allende admits that her version of the truth is mythic ("memory twists in an out, like an endless Mobius strip"), her portrait of Chile--its people, customs, traditions, religion, economy, and politics--seems candidly honest. According to Allende, typical Chilean characteristics are generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, enthusiasm for political argument, and resignation to a crushing bureaucracy. "The problem [of bureaucracy] has reached such proportions," she writes, "that the government itself has created an office to combat bureaucracy. . . . Kafka was Chilean." Like a jewel serendipitously discovered, My Invented Country sparkles with the revelation of painful truth, a freshness of wit and wisdom, and a hilarious sense of humor. It's a precious literary gem.
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