My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

Isabel Allende's memoir is an exercise in nostalgia, a personal and often humorous exploration of Chile, her family, and the experiences of exile that shaped her identity as a writer. Rather than following a strict chronology, the book moves thematically through descriptions of Chilean geography, culture, and politics, memories of Allende's childhood and youth, and reflections on the decades she has spent living outside her homeland.

Allende opens by describing Chile as a remote, narrow country at the southern tip of South America, isolated by the Atacama Desert, the Andes, the Pacific Ocean, and Antarctica. She divides the country into four regions, from the mineral-rich desert north to the enchanted forests and fjords of the south, and recounts childhood memories of traveling by train through the Atacama toward Bolivia. She characterizes Chileans as insular and self-centered, and cites the poet Pablo Neruda as essential for understanding Chile's spirit.

Her childhood in Santiago forms the emotional core of the memoir. Allende was born in Lima, Peru, where her father worked at the Chilean embassy. When she was four, he abandoned the family, leaving her mother with three children and unpaid bills. Her mother returned to Santiago to live under the roof of Allende's maternal grandfather, Agustín, a disciplined, stoic man of Spanish-Basque origins who became the defining figure of her early life. Allende describes the grandfather's house in the barrio of Providencia as her childhood universe, filled with eccentric relatives, heavy furniture, and the ghostly friends of her clairvoyant grandmother Isabel. She evokes the domestic rituals of mid-century Santiago: buying bread at the corner bakery, making manjar blanco (a milk caramel) over an outdoor fire, and summer trips to the beach.

Allende traces her maternal family's history through the ancestral house on Calle Cueto, the model for the large house in her first novel, The House of the Spirits. The family was vast and colorful: her grandmother Isabel married Agustín after his first love, Rosa Barros, died mysteriously. Her great-grandmother Ester was a domineering matriarch whose husband lost his fortune and killed himself with a shotgun, a suicide the family disguised by dressing the corpse and transporting it to Santiago for a Christian burial. Allende catalogs eccentric family members: a 100-year-old aunt who aspired to sainthood, her mother's cousin Tío Jaime, who became a famous pediatrician and radical Communist politician after paying for medical school by playing accordion in brothels, and a relative photographed in his undershorts after giving his trousers to the poor.

From family, Allende expands outward to examine Chile's rigid class system, which she compares to a millefeuille, a many-layered pastry. She challenges the national claim that Chile has no racial problems, noting that racism persists under the euphemism of "the class system." She discusses the Mapuche, an Indigenous people whose fierce resistance to Spanish colonization was immortalized in the 16th-century epic poem La Araucana, and describes the country's racist immigration policies, which favored northern Europeans. She explains the Chilean practice of situating, a process of social classification that, since the 1973 military coup, has also encompassed political orientation.

Allende devotes sustained attention to the position of women in Chilean society. She traces machismo to the violent unions of the Spanish conquest and observes that Chilean women are complicit in perpetuating the system, raising daughters to serve and sons to be served. She discusses organized women's political power, citing the rightist women who banged pots and pans to help incite the 1973 coup, and later the Women for Life movement that helped overturn the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile's military ruler from 1973 to 1990, only to dissolve and cede power back to men.

Religion and superstition form another thematic strand. Allende characterizes Chile as intensely Catholic but notes that its religiosity involves more superstition than theology. She recounts her grandmother's paranormal experiments and describes the folk beliefs of Chiloé, an island group in southern Chile with its own mythology of warlocks and monsters. Her grandmother's conviction that reality has multiple dimensions, accessible through instinct, imagination, and dreams, introduced Allende to a worldview she would later recognize as magical realism.

The memoir's emotional turning point comes with the grandmother's death from leukemia. Her grandfather, furious at being abandoned, dressed in black, painted the furniture black, and forbade music, flowers, and desserts. Allende was plagued by childhood fears and sustained only by reading, with access to her uncle Pablo's enormous library. Her mother scandalized Santiago by falling in love with Ramón Huidobro (Tío Ramón), a married man and nephew of a bishop. Allende's grandfather defied convention by welcoming Tío Ramón into the house.

At nine, Allende left Santiago to follow Tío Ramón to Bolivia, then spent three years in Beirut, Lebanon, where she felt isolated and homesick. She returned to Santiago at 15, disoriented and speaking with a foreign accent. Her grandfather taught her Chilean history and literature, and their travels to the coast, mountains, and Patagonia deepened her love for the country. She married her first boyfriend, Miguel Frías, and despite her feminist convictions became what she calls a "typical Chilean wife, selfless and servile as a geisha" (131), working multiple jobs while still laying out her husband's clothes.

Allende transitioned from secretarial work at the United Nations into journalism and television. She visited shantytowns around Santiago, witnessing poverty and domestic violence that would inform her writing. After traveling in Europe with her husband and daughter Paula, where she discovered the Women's Liberation movement, she returned to Chile and began working for a feminist magazine called Paula, which addressed taboo subjects including divorce, contraception, and abortion.

The memoir's political center is Allende's account of Salvador Allende's presidency and the 1973 coup. Salvador Allende, her father's cousin, won the 1970 election as the first Marxist to gain a presidency through a democratic vote, leading a coalition called the Unidad Popular. The CIA orchestrated a destabilization campaign that included a plot to kidnap General René Schneider, the commander in chief of the armed forces, resulting in Schneider's death. Despite severe shortages and inflation, the Unidad Popular increased its vote share in the 1973 parliamentary elections. On September 11, 1973, the army bombed the presidential palace, the Palacio de la Moneda. Salvador Allende died inside, officially by suicide. Pinochet installed a dictatorship that imposed brutal repression and a neoliberal economic model.

Allende stayed in Chile for a year and a half after the coup, sheltering fugitives and helping people escape over embassy walls. In 1975, she left for Venezuela, carrying a handful of Chilean soil. Exile proved devastating: Her marriage deteriorated, and she could not find work as a journalist. For seven years she pounded an old typewriter in the kitchen at night, only to rip up everything she produced. On January 8, 1981, she began a letter to her dying grandfather that became The House of the Spirits, an attempt to recapture her lost country and preserve the memories being scattered by exile.

After divorcing her first husband, Allende met William Gordon (Willie) during a book tour in the United States. They married in 1987 and settled in San Francisco. In 1988, Pinochet lost a national referendum, and Chile began its return to democracy. Allende visited Santiago and found a changed, cautious city. On the return flight, seeing San Francisco Bay, she said "Back home at last" (203) for the first time. The marriage was tested by devastating losses: Willie's daughter Jennifer died of an overdose, and Allende's daughter Paula died of porphyria, a rare genetic condition, after a long coma. In 1998, Allende witnessed Pinochet's arrest in London on charges from a Spanish judge, an event that shattered the tacit agreement to bury the truth about the dictatorship.

The memoir closes with Allende's settled sense of dual identity. She declares that California is her home and Chile the land of her nostalgia, and that her heart "isn't divided, it has merely grown larger" (208). She credits the practice of writing with constructing the country inside her head and warns the reader not to believe everything she says, declaring that "Word by word I have created the person I am and the invented country in which I live" (208).