Ode to Isabel Allende

I remember reading The House of Spirits in my teens when I was still at school and falling in love with the level of fantasy and by the eventfulness of the book. But meeting Isabel Allende in real life is a completely different thing.

First of all she is petit - and keeps making jokes about it. She is some sort of small bundle of energy with plenty of stories and jokes and a wonderful understanding of people. She gave a reading of her latest book, her autobiography, on Tuesday at the Southbank Centre. She travels with her American husband Willie, a really nice guy, who is the central part of a good part of her jokes.

Before going I had done some research, visited her homepage and learnt that she despites being Chilean she has lived for a long time first in Venezuela and then in California. Now in her second marriage, she has a son (her daughter died in the early 1990s) and three grandchildren. Her family is very lively and she loves writing letters - which is what some of her novels evolve from. Before she turned a novelist she worked as a journalist (apparently Pablo Neruda refused to be interviewed by her claiming her fantasy is too developed and she should be a novelist instead) and as a literary translator (she was fired because she changed dialogs and endings to make the women in the books sound less "idiotic"). As a matter of fact you never know if something she's telling or writing is true or not, but does it really matter? She truly is a great lady!!