Product Description

Allende is a wonderful teller of tales and through the story of Eva Luna we enter a sweet but sinister world where fact and fiction merge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26991 in Books
• Published on: 1994-12-29
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende is the author of the worldwide bestseller The House of Spirits, as well as the equally successful novels Of Love and Shadows and The Stories of Eva Luna. Initially a journalist, Allende began writing fiction in 1981. She now lives in California.

Customer Reviews

Eva Luna clearly reflects the author herself
This is a truly engaging tale. Eva means life, and Luna, meaning moon in spanish, establishes her strong feminine, even matriachal, identity early in the book. As she takes on the different roles of daughter, mother and sister through the span of the book, we see her strong will and ability to survive in a country that is dominantly male. Eva Luna's gift of narration is very similar to Allende's own, only the latter conveys her strong, memorable message of feminism through the power of words, translated for the rest of the world to read. An extraordinarily wonderful book, and a must for anyone who has read her other books before.

Magic Unrealism
Isabel Allende's Eva Luna manages to be about many diverse things: a picaresque soap opera; the story of Latin America; the tale of a woman coming to self-determination; an autobiography; a description of the creation and nature of fiction: and yet never loses its narrative fascination. Allende uses very little dialog, and the characters, Eva herself included, are more 'imaginary' than most novelists attempt: but believable and in the end quite moving.

This was narrative at its most magical. It bore the signs of great art, at least for me: the resonance of other times and places, the sense of recognition...

Eva Luna at first reminded me strongly of Fina Estampa by Caetano Veloso, so much so that I went looking for a song called Eva Luna on the CD which wasn't there.

I read recently an exact parallel of the episode of the bald patrina in a story in Ihara Saikaku's Life of an Amorous Woman written in 17th century Japan (basis for Mizoguchi's Life of Oharu for those interested), which was odd.

Between reality and fantasy
Behind a story that might seems like fantasy there is so much realism, it could have happened in the middle of the story of some latin american country... And the characters, those are so real, in their way of suffering, of living, of loving, they are so intense! I've read it the first time when I was 15 years old, and then I read it over and over again... It's one of those books that I can say that I'm glad it came into my life, because in somehow, I was not the same after reading it............