Product Description

Niece of the assassinated Chilean president Salvador Allende, Isabel Allende has written a luminous literary novel that traces the life of an orphan from her impoverished beginnings to her rise to fame and fortune. HC: Knopf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #384539 in Books
• Published on: 1989-06-01
• Released on: 1989-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780553280586
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
A woman makes love to an Indian dying of snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva"so she will love life." Thus begins Allende's latest novel, a magnificent successor to The House of the Spirits and Of Love & Shadows. Set in a Latin American country, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures. Brought up in the house of an eccentric doctor devoted to mummifying corpses, where her mother is a servant, Eva is left an orphan at six. Her black godmother, or madrina , leases her as a servant to a series of bizarre households of metaphorical significance, the last of which she leaves in grand style upon emptying a government Minister's chamberpot over his head. Interleaved with Eva's story is her account of a certain Rolf Carle, with whom her life will become linkedshe tells of his youth in Nazi Austria and young manhood as a filmmaker in South America. Through a series of improbable and felicitous coincidences, Eva is taken under the wing of such exotic benefactors as a street urchin who becomes a guerrilla leader, a colorful whorehouse Madam, a kindly Turkish merchant and a stunningly beautiful transsexual. Like the author, Eva is a prodigious fabulist, weaving extraordinary tales that change reality at will, making it, as she says, easier to bear. Although the fabulist's art is seen as dangerously escapist, Allende's wonderful novel, crammed with the strange and fantastical, the sensuous and the erotic, also speaks powerfully in the cause of freedom. 40,000 first printing; BOMC and QPBC alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Born in the back room of the mansion where her mother toils, and herself in service from an early age, the enchanting and ever-enchanted Eva Luna escapes oppression through story telling. Rolf Carle flees Germany for South America, and ultimately works as a documentary film maker, to escape childhood memories of burying the concentration camp dead. The two are brought together by guerrilla Huberto NaranjoEva's lover and a subject for Rolf's camerain this dense, opulent novel that serves as a metaphor for redemption through creative effort. In her earlier works ( The House of the Spirits, LJ 4/15/85; Of Love and Shadows, LJ 5/1/87), Allende's rich language occasionally shaded into overripeness; but here the prose is more tightly controlled, the characterizations defter. Her best work yet. BOMC alternate. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Imaginative, original, convincing, pointed, and  spiced with good humor and wit." --  San Francisco  Chronicle.

"Remarkable... a cascade of stories tumbles out  before the reader, stories vivid and passionate and  human... Allende seems to draw characters and  tales from a bottomless well as Eva Luna narrates  the story of her life." --  Washington Post Book World.

"An  epic tale... Eva matures and comes to love a  Turkish merchant, a guerrilla fighter, and a German  immigrant... [in] this romantic confection of a  novel." -- People -- Review

Customer Reviews

The author's use of magic realism will spur your imagination
Are you looking to add some vivid color into your life? Isabel Allende's literary and highly imaginative writing style will captivate and and delight you in this highly visual and sensual novel. I found this book to be much better and less formulaic than the HOUSE OF SPIRITS was. The character is fully fleshed out and seems more real; perhaps because the protagonist is a woman, Eva Luna herself, and in the other book, Allende offers the narrative through a domineering and somewhat obtuse man's eyes. The growth of Eva Luna is beautifually told and readers will identify with her throughout. This evocative novel set my imagination on fire and made all the colors in my world appear brighter while I was reading it.

CAPTIVATING
Conceived on her father's deathbed and almost strangled to death by her umbilical cord, the baby who emerged would become the woman, Eva Luna. Her birth is incredible and her life is even more so as Eva spins for us her story and the story of those who impacted her life.

Isabel Allende captivates the reader by having us take a glimpse of the life and times of Eva Luna, a child whose life is so surreal and incredible to the point where fact and fantasy become one and the same. Eva's voice sweeps us into the dark world of perverts, undesirables and revolutionaries. Through Eva's stories you get a closer look at a society rotten at its core while masquerading as a democracy.

Come with Eva, as a little girl where she plays with a stuffed puma owned by a mad-man who uses Indians for his embalming experiments. Watch as this orphaned girl is "sold" off by her strange godmother who believes in the gods of her ancesteral Africa and the saints of Catholicism. Watch Eva as she grows from childhood to adolescense to an adult who has to confront the reality of love and revolution.

EVA LUNA is a lyric tale whose language draws you immediately into the life of the character and her supporting cast. You feel a deep empathy for this woman and you see through her eyes the contradictions that life has to offer. Allende has given us an exceptional work that explores both the spiritual, political and sensual side of a woman caught up in the stream of chaos in her South American country. Come, let Eva tell you a story, her story and you will find yourself unable to tear yourself away from her amazing tale.

BEAUTIFUL AND EXTREMELY ENTERTAINING
This amazing story of an orphan whose life seemed to have finished an expedition through the most enigmatic and most pleasurable world, is the novel that is to be never forgotten because of its amazing magic. Magic that will serve as your carpet ride through the most amazing story of a woman's life: Eva Luna's. Eva Luna, the sexy, naughty, adorable, beautiful woman is a shining proof of the existence of literature's wonders. Isabel Allende created a literary jewel.