My 5th Isabel Allende book! A couple of years ago I read Allende's autobiographical work "Paula", which is a sad recount of her daughter's long coma and death, and what Allende went through during that time. "My Invented Country" gives a broader overview of the author's life from childhood to the turn of the century. This book was published in 2003 and I googled some recent stuff on her and things have changed inevitably (Willy and her are no longer together since 2015). There's no doubt that Isabel Allende has a very charming personality. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with her books. They are easy reads, but at times I find myself annoyed by the characters and the many love scenes. Anyway, I enjoyed this non-fiction work a lot and I think it's probably my favorite Allende book. She really comes across as a thoughtful and determined woman. I love her reflections on where she comes from and how she has changed due to moving around the world a lot. I could totally relate to a lot of what she said, which was very consoling for me."Being a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, means that I have to make a much greater effort than the natives, which has kept me on my toes and forced me to become flexible and adapt to different surroundings. This condition has some advantages for someone who earns her living by observing; nothing seems natural to me, almost everything surprises me. I ask absurd questions, but sometimes I ask them of the right people and thus get ideas for my novels."Allende introduces the reader to Chile, her home country and where both of her parents are from. Sometimes Allende feels very Chilean, but sometimes she feels like a foreigner when she returns back to Chile (she has lived in the US since the 80s). When she describes Chileans, she uses a lot of generalizations, which are subjective of course, but after a while made me roll my eyes. No doubt that the book is very entertaining and I learned a lot about Allende's background and her views on life. "...In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives ... but memory is always cloudy, we can't trust it. Things that happened in the past have fuzzy outlines, they're pale; it's as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of events I don't understand, or only half understand. I have absolutely no sense of certainty."Highly recommend this to any Allende reader.

This is Isabel Allende's funny and sorrowful tribute to her native country. She starts off with amusing stories: a cat-killing refrigerator; her grandfather's insistence that he saw the devil on a bus; her father who disguised himself as a Peruvian Indian woman with bright petticoats and a wig with long braids. Later in the book she moves on to the horror and repression suffered by the Chilean people following the CIA-assisted military coup in 1973. The book is not so much a memoir as it is an exploration of the nostalgia that has informed Allende's life and writing. She left Chile in 1975 to escape Pinochet's dictatorship. Her longing for that country of her memory and invention is palpable on every page. I've read several of her novels and always imagined her as a serious person. Here in her non-fiction writing I was surprised and delighted by her sense of humor. It's very wry and sometimes has barbs, but I found myself laughing out loud many times. She shares bizarre stories about her loony family members and explains the origins of the Chilean national character traits. The book is loosely organized, but Allende has the charms to make it work. There's a little history, a little geography, some politics, a lot of Chilean culture, and a whole lot of heart.If you've read her novels, this book will give you some insight into how she comes by some of her wild creations. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her beloved grandfather who was dying. She describes the resulting novel as "an attempt to recapture my lost country, to reunite my scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their memories, which were beginning to be blown away in the whirlwind of exile."

Invented Country, yes. But Nostalgic Journey Through Chile? Not really. My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile is more than anything else an autobiography of a life fragmented by years of exile due to the violence of the Pinochet regime. In addition, the (probably) murdered left-leaning ex-president, Salvador Allende Gossens, was a favorite relative of hers. Isabel Allende's Chile is primarily in her heart. Her first book, House of the Spirits, was written while she was living in Venezuela, about which she writes:If someone had asked what it was about, I would have said that it was an attempt to recapture my lost country, to reunite my scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their memories, which were beginning to be blown away in the whirlwind of exile.Curiously, this is a very exact description also of My Invented Country.I had hoped to read some background about Chile for a projected trip later this year. Reading it, I found ou a whole lot about the author, but only a few scattered tidbits about the country as a whole.