Click to return to the current issue . Starting her professional life as a journalist in Chile, in 1975 she was forced to flee to Venezuela to escape Augusto Pinochet's fascist regime, which two years earlier, reportedly with CIA assistance, had assassinated her cousin Salvador Allende, then president of Chile. Allende's latest, Daughter of Fortune , is a novel that mirrors its author's tendency to follow unexpected paths. Eliza instead finds herself in an entirely different relationship with Tao Ch'ien, a Chinese doctor. What begins almost as romance fiction, full of breathless embraces and stolen kisses, rapidly becomes a novel about Eliza's search for self-knowledge.
Every book is related to some kind of quest.
While I am writing, the quest is not clear, but sooner or later it becomes obvious. Maybe Eliza Sommers is me. Maybe I was her in another life. You ve been quoted repeatedly as saying that with your writing, you could seduce any man. I think that the greatest aphrodisiac is imagination, and if you can trigger something in a person s imagination, in a man s imagination, you can seduce him and make him love you, and this has been my life experience.