Ines of My Soul
by Isabel Allende
HarperCollins, HK$202
Isabel Allende loves entering the waters of a novel. Con brio, she announces her narrators in a voice that never grows stale - the literate and humorous tones of a born intrigante, both spirited and weightlessly cynical, and also conscious of her trickeries. Thirty-five million books deep in the universal consciousness, Allende can afford to be capricious, and with Ines of My Soul, she's no different.
This time, though, Allende's story - however embellished by girls who emit the fragrance of roses and those who sprout wings - is based on fact. Ines de Suarez, born about 1507 in Spain, was a conquistadora who helped found Chile. She divined water for her convoy in the desert and ferociously protected her loves. In 1541, she defended Santiago against the Mapuche by joining the men outside, decapitating tribal chiefs and maintaining morale. Widowed, she took Chile's conqueror, Pedro de Valdivia, as a lover, and later married Chile's future royal governor, Rodrigo de Quiroga.
Allende does and does not do de Suarez justice. In anointing her the subject of a novel, Allende not only elevates de Suarez to shimmering international recognition and smashes a hoary historical gender archetype, but slips another in its place: the hot-headed, breast-beating, fist-waving spitfire. And then there's the book itself to consider. 'I must not linger on details ... because if we dally this account may be left unfinished, and no one wants to read hundreds of quartos only to find that the story has no clear ending.' Therein the book's real weakness: death by fact. Rather than anchoring her narrative with history, Allende makes of it a quag.
