One of the most popular books this summer at the Nashua Public Library, in both English and Spanish, is Isabel Allende’s “My name is Emilia del Valle.” The library says copies in both languages have been checked out for weeks.
Read a Spanish version of this story
The historical fiction novel tells the story of Emilia, who grows up in San Francisco with many questions about her past and a deep curiosity about Chile. This, along with her passion for writing, motivates her to visit that South American country in the midst of a civil war, in 1891. Emilia covers the war but also reconnects with her roots and herself.
Allende spoke with our ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire? about the war that inspired the novel. She believes in the power of reliving the past to face current challenges.
Below is a translated transcript of the interview María Aguirre did with Allende in Spanish for NHPR.
Transcript
A lot of your other works, like “The Wind Knows My Name,” explore the connections between past and present. In a moment of fear and uncertainty for a lot of communities, what can the history in Emilia del Valle teach us about resilience?
I’m not trying to teach anything because I write fiction. When I have a message, I write nonfiction essays, I give speeches and I work through my foundation. All my activism, political and social, is through my foundation. But in any work of art, you can find echoes of your own life and what’s happening to your life. In a historical novel, you can discover something in the past that has echoes or similarities with something that we are living today, and it gives us a new perspective to look at it from many angles, not just immersed in what is affecting us today. We are bombarded by bad news and we are trapped in a situation we can’t see beyond it. So one of the great virtues of literature and art in general is that it gives us a broader vision of what’s going on.
Who inspired the story of Emilia del Valle?
It was the Civil War. There was a Civil War in Chile in 1891 that has echoes and similarities with what happened in Chile 82 years later, in 1973. I was already alive then, in 1973. That’s why it interested me so much what happened in the past, because in both times there was a progressive president that tried to make changes and involve the people and found a huge opposition from the conservative part of the country.
(Allende highlighted the difference between the military intervention in 1891 and 1973. In the first civil war, the army joined the government and the navy, the opposition. Although it lasted a bit, Allende said that the four months of battle caused more fatalities than in the war against Bolivia and Peru. In 1973, the armed forces intervened, but did not divide, and the result was a dictatorship that lasted 17 years.)
Both times, the president chose suicide before giving up or exile. This makes them heroic figures in the history of Chile. I was interested in the second episode, the military coup, and dictatorship because I saw that kind of thing happen, and I had the feeling it could happen again anytime.
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