Isabel Allende about 'Violeta': "I have the whole life of my mother in letters"

They are 24.000 The letters in which each nuance of Violeta's voice is hidden.The voice "affectionate, ironic, vibrant" and, sometimes, "detached" of Isabel Allende's mother who gives life to the last of strong, invincible and passionate women created by the most read writer more read in Spanish around the world."I have my whole mother in letters because she wrote me every day," the author explains to the almost 120 journalists from Spain, Latin America and the United States accredited in the telematics press conference that puts the new longChilean book that goes on January 25 for sale.

However, the writer clarifies, Violeta is not the story of her mother because, "although she had plentyextraordinary but his life was not extraordinary ".“My mother could never stay alone, and she was first subjected to her father, then her husband and, finally, I was the one who paid the accounts.He never had the economic freedom that I always wanted for her, and that is what I gave violet.Because there is no feminism without economic independence ”.

Thus, the "beautiful, interesting and intelligent woman who was her mother (she died before the emergence of Covid in the world) and many of the" own experiences "of Allende's turbulent and magnificent life configure a novel that movesIn a century.Because Violeta del Valle, its protagonist, is born and says goodbye to the world with a pandemic.

From 1920 to 2020 and, in between, a series of historical events that, with more or less intensity, impact its existence: the death of the father during the CRAC of 29, World War II and the escaped to Latin America, the Conference ofHavana and the golden years of the mafia in Cuba during the dictatorship of Batista, the height of drugs, the struggle of the feminist movement for women's rights and the promulgation of universal female suffrage, the dictatorships of the seventiesthat refer to those of Chile and Argentina, the flights of death or, among others, the operation condor...

“But Chile is never named, as with the House of Spirits or Eva Luna, the novel is not located in a specific place because that allows me to move the dates if the story requires it, if I say that it is Chile, byExample, I cannot place the earthquake in 2011, which is where it is better for the narrative, "discover about the country that has" inside "," under the skin "and that you don't want to" take out "even though it does"40 years that I don't live there "."It costs me anything to rebuild any part of the country at any time," he says.

Taking into account that ease to weave a good part of the scene and that familiarity with the voice of the protagonist, it is not strange that Allende announce that he has not cost him "any effort" to write this novel.“It was hard for me to find the idea of the letter, to make it as a long letter in which Violeta writes to his grandson, because at first I began to write it in the third person, but I had a lot of distance between Violeta and the reader;But later, everything was organic, natural, the tone was there, in my mother's letters, in my mother's voice, ”he says.

Maybe the secret is in "listening".Listen to the story that one carries inside, with "the confidence that you can write it", "without a shirt of strength that Ate"."I sat in front of the computer on January 8 with an idea and with the confidence to see where this comes out".As always, according to the journalists Allende who asserts that "there is never a previous script", "neither plan", "nor foresight".There is "something to tell" and the characters are introduced "according to the story and, there are times - detates - that I have to go out to look for them to make them human and do not stay in the cartoon"."For me to write is how to launch with a candle to a dark place and, little by little, some areas are illuminating," compares.

This is how he wrote this violet, but so, he says that he also wrote the house of the spirits now 40 years ago.The novel that "paved the way to the others that came later".The novel that made her writer.Or what did writer?"Exile, no doubt.What made me a writer is that I could not remain a journalist.I was a journalist in Chile and was happy.That ended when I left Chile and for many years I lived in a kind of forced silence, which was not being able to express myself in journalism until by chance I ended up writing the house of the spirits, ”he recalls.

Since then, and until now, Allende, which this year celebrates its 80th birthday, maintains “the same passion”.Passion "for writing", passion "in love" that, he points out, continues to be reflected in his novels, "in the last, with older couples, also" although in Violeta the reader will find different types of love and in different ages of the protagonist.

"Many, of course, of those that I have lived.It has happened to me now that at 77 I married a man of Polish origin with whom I had nothing in common and these that fish for the pandemic locked up for two years and there we continue to live, in our eternal honeymoon ”He speaks without capujuLike the new Government of Chile, about its militant feminism on and that has left "the endless tails of book signature and the presentation tour" because they never liked.Isabel Allende is free.

"My mother always said that I exposed me too much in my books but I know that the only secret that makes us vulnerable is the one that is not counted," says a woman who is not afraid of time: "I do not consider my old.It will be that in the field of literature there is no age because it is one of the professions in which you can age while you have your head well ”.