My invented country
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: May 4, 2004
Language: eng
Translated from: spa
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780007163106
First sentence: I was born in the years of the smoke and carnage of the Second World War and the greatest part of my youth was spent waiting for the planet to blow apart when someone dis pressed a button deploying atomic bombs.
Description: Isabel Allende evokes the magnificent landscapes of her country; a charming, idiosyncratic Chilean people with a violent history and an indomitable spirit, and the politics, religion, myth, and magic of her homeland that she carries with her even today. The book circles around two life-changing moments. The assassination of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens on September 11, 1973, sent her into exile and transformed her into a literary writer. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on her adopted homeland, the United States, brought forth an overdue acknowledgment that Allende had indeed left home. My Invented Country, mimicking the workings of memory itself, ranges back and forth across that distance between past and present lives. It speaks compellingly to immigrants and to all of us who try to retain a coherent inner life in a world full of contradictions.