Miami, Aug 2 (EFE).- Isabel Allende, The most widely read living writer in Spanish in the world, turns 80 this Tuesday without giving much importance to the figure and grateful with life for being able to love, write and be connected to her many millions of readers.
“Love is, as they say, the backbone that supports me and writing occupies the entire landscape,” Allende told Efe in an interview in which he hints at his fear of when the day comes when he cannot continue writing as until now.
The Chilean writer born in Lima and nationalized from the United States has just done gymnastics and is pleased that her teacher has told her that she is capable of doing exercises that some 20-year-olds cannot do.
But then he says that he knows there will come a time when he will no longer have the deed.
“For thousands of reasons, because one is losing memory, the ability to focus on something, attention and even physically, there will come a time when I will surely not be able to sit in front of the computer ten hours a day,” he says. .
80 + 40 = ISABEL ALLENDE AND THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS
This “round” number birthday comes to Allende in the year in which the fortieth anniversary of “The House of the Spirits” (1982), his first novel, which he began writing in Venezuela in 1981 as a letter, is celebrated. spiritual” to his grandfather who lived in Chile and was dying.
The letter that did not become one but became an important novel in Latin American literature in the 20th century was to tell her grandfather that he could go quietly: she kept all the family stories that he had told her.
Memories of the turbulent times in which Allende had to leave his country due to the coup perpetrated in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet always make Isabel Allende, niece of the ousted president, Salvador Allende, get excited
She is also emotional when asked how being a political refugee in Venezuela changed her life.
“I learned to be more humble,” he says and confesses later that in Chile “a little fumes had gone to his head,” because he already had a certain “name” as a journalist.
“When you go somewhere as a refugee, the past is completely lost. Anything, whether it’s your experience or your knowledge, nobody cares, what matters to establish are the connections », he emphasizes.
Allende spent years “very frustrated and with the feeling of total failure,” but she was saved by writing “The House of the Spirits” and beginning to feel that “nostalgia, memory, was reborn.”
THE YEAR HE “DROPED” A BOOK
He assures that he never thought he would be successful with his first work, which has been followed by 24 more books, fiction and other genres, the last of them “Violeta”.
By cabal and by discipline, every January 8, the day “The House of the Spirits” began, Allende sits down to write his next work, but in 2022, for the first time in 40 years, the book “dropped” and had to abandon the project in May.
«It was not my fault (…) I was hung up first waiting to see if I could recover it, but then it was no longer possible. And so now I am preparing an idea, researching, preparing an idea for the next year, on January 8 », she relates.
Several times in the interview she speaks of her current husband, whom she married three years ago, and almost as much of the previous one, the late Willam C. Gordon, whom she divorced in 2015, the year in which -she says, for something, some “psychosomatic” back pains went away.
Her third husband, Roger Cukras, an American lawyer of Polish origin, is taking intensive Spanish classes.
LOVE AND DEATH
“I told him clearly, look, there are things that have to be in Spanish: cooking, making love, fighting, well, of course, writing,” he stresses.
Having lived since 1987 in a country where English, a “very precise” language, is the dominant language has had repercussions on Allende’s prose, but “the passage of time also influences,” he specifies.
“When I started writing 40 years ago, literature -he underlines- was different (…) first of all, everything was much longer, much more baroque”, while now there is a predominance of “the visual” and all writers have made “more concise”.
The Allende of before was looking for an adjective that would show “something in a different, original way”, but today “she is looking for a noun that replaces adjectives or a noun so good that it does not need adjectives” to achieve a prose “clear, clean, transparent and light.
When asked about the Nobel Prize for Literature, he replies: «I think anyone is excited, but I’m never thinking about it. I never think about awards, or doctorates. That’s a very masculine way of thinking.”
But he is interested in “the relationship with readers, that connection that I feel, that interests me much more than prizes or things that accumulate and that at some point in youth may have been important.”
Every day she receives many letters from readers, including at least three or four from mothers or fathers who have lost a child, as happened to her with her daughter Paula, to whom she dedicated a book of the same name in which she undressed her soul before the readers.
“I want to know what place I occupy emotionally in the lives of my readers,” says an author who has sold 75 million copies of her works, which have been translated into 42 languages.
This year she was portrayed in a television series, with which she says she is very happy, and rumors arose that she had a hidden love with the Argentine composer and musician Astor Piazzola.
“I did not know Mr. Piazzola,” a woman who says she does not have secrets but knows how to keep those that others entrust to her tells Efe, more amused than angry.
An agnostic, she does not believe in life after death and when asked what her idea of hell is, she unhesitatingly stresses “violence”.
“I’m afraid of losing those I love the most and I’m afraid of being a burden to others, but dying doesn’t scare me,” he says.
