The Sum of Our Days
by Isabel Allende
Fourth Estate, HK$280
It is no accident that Isabel Allende has sold 51 million books in 30 languages. She has changed the literary landscape with discipline, an inexhaustible imagination and criminal levels of charm; her oeuvre is aphrodisiacal, as panoptic in scope as the most beguiling of love affairs. To read her work is to resign from the quotidian.
There is nothing ordinary about Allende's worlds, however ardently they may depict the everyday; whether writing about her own life, that of historical figures, or those of characters (her own and others), she imparts a sense of magisterial frivolity. And this, the latest of her 16 books, is no different, documenting the births and deaths, weddings and divorces, unions and reunions, abuses and shifting land mass of Allende's half-American family.
It begins in 1993 - where Paula, the memoir Allende wrote for her comatose and now 16 years deceased daughter, ends - and threads through the intervening years. 'I am a born liar,' she states, 'so fiction is my territory ... Then, why tackle a memoir? I want to remember. If I don't write it, I forget, and then it is as if it never happened; by recording my life I can live twice.'
Drawing on the daily letters she has written to her 'immortal' mother for more than three decades, Allende is confronted by a serious complication: her second husband's family has no interest in being exposed. Forced to rein in her rich descriptive prowess and genius for observation, she reasons that there 'is no lack of drama in my life. I have more than enough three-ring circus material for writing.'