MEMOIR: The Sum Of Our Days, By Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, Faber and faber, 301pp, £16.99THERE IS much to admire about Chilean writer Isabel Allende. She first stampeded through the male-dominated Latin-American literary scene with her magical debut novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1982, a welcome new voice with a compelling, matriarchal perspective on the machismo of her native country, writes Fiona McCann.
Since then, Allende, who was exiled from her home country after a bloody military coup in 1973 brought down the government of Chile's elected leader (and her mother's cousin), Salvador Allende, has settled in California and produced, over the course of a prolific writing career, a staggering 17 books.
The latest of these is a memoir, The Sum of Our Days, written, she claims in the foreword, on the suggestion of her agent, Carmel Balcells. "If it comes down to choosing between telling a story and offending relatives, any professional writer chooses the former," Balcells reassures her, although it's hard to believe Allende required much convincing, given that this is not the first time she has mined her family history for material.
IN MANY ways, this latter book is a follow-up to her memoir Paula, which was a moving account of her childhood in Chile, the political upheaval that so marked her family and ushered in a dictatorship that was to last for 17 years, and her emergence as a writer, all told to her 29-year-old daughter who, in 1992, fell into a coma from which she never recovered.
The Sum of Our Days takes up where Paula left off, with her daughter's ashes scattered in the opening paragraph, as Allende's family - or tribe, as she prefers to call it - attempts to come to terms with their terrible loss and move forward with their own lives.
The book is limited, Allende explains, to the story of this expanding group of people, whose remarkable tales of drug addiction, thwarted passion, exotic travels and failed breast implants one would think would provide ample fodder for the kind of colourful ramblings on which Allende has built her reputation. One daughter-in-law disappears, another is forced to overcome an entrenched homophobia when she falls in love with her brother-in-law's girlfriend, there's a pair of Buddhist lesbians who adopt one of Allende's husband's grand-daughters, while the husband in question, her second husband, Willie Gordon, writes a book about a perverted dwarf.
So why does it fall so disappointingly flat? Allende is immediately up-front about the fact that there are characters she is precluded from writing about. Two of Willie's sons are left out of the memoir entirely: one, because he has specifically asked to be omitted and another because he impinges so little on her life that Allende has nothing to say about him.
IT'S A forthright admission of the inevitable constraints that go with writing about real people, people whose human sensitivities and, in this case, close proximity to the author may impede her from treating them to the kind of larger-than-live portraiture that makes for a good story. It's hard to know how much the real-life nature of her reportage prevented Allende from elaborating with her usual flourish, and how much the lack of colour is down to the calming influences of her contented California existence. Conflicts may abound - they are pretty much unavoidable in a family so geographically and emotionally close - but if they are all going to be resolved with the kind of reason and equanimity of life-coach veterans and therapy groupies, it doesn't exactly make for a rip-roaring read.
There's also the problem of Allende herself, the consummate meddling matriarch, who exhibits a confessed fondness for controlling the lives of all around her, becoming particularly smug when she manages to procure a wife for her son or when a friend's relationship fails just as she had predicted. She appears to manipulate her family in the same way she does her fictional characters, controlling their destinies as if she were authoring them herself. Though she acknowledges her own shortcomings and interfering impulses on more than one occasion, her tone at times comes across as so self-satisfied that it makes it hard for the reader to remain sympathetic.
The Sum of Our Days, a detailed chronicle of how her family has grown and changed in the years since Paula appeared, is addressed to Allende's daughter once again, and it's easy to see how much of it would appeal to the young woman who was deprived of the chance to share in this life when porphyria took hers at such an early age. But, unlike Paula, the reader has no such investment in those whose lives are being documented, and it's hard to summon up an interest as Allende tells of one's doomed love affair and another's fertility problems. More appealing perhaps for Allende fans are the clues it provides into how much these people have informed her fictional creations, along with the descriptions of how her novels came about, for example the story of Zorro, her 14th book, which literally was deposited in her lap by three strangers who arrived at her doorstep one day to offer her the rights to write it.
This one-time magic realist ends the book in the arms of her husband, Willie, in a touching tribute to their resilient love, but while readers may applaud this very real contentment in one whose life has been so touched by tragedy, many will also secretly mourn the magic, the thrills and colours that the upheavals of a disturbed, now-distant past once brought to her writing.
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Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist