(A generation that never read Cheever's stories battened on his posthumously published journals.) In 'Paula,' Ms. We expect memoirs to reveal secrets that fiction delicately masks. Margaret Sayers Peden's translation does ample justice to the original. Allende invokes these family spirits and many others with tremendous verve, generous detail and irresistibly rhythmic prose, as if her narrative could distract death itself. She reads his unexpurgated 'Thousand and One Nights' on the sly. Her stepfather, a charming diplomat, teaches her debating tricks and social skills. Allende's father, a decadent aristocrat, disappears when she's an infant. He takes his small granddaughter to wrestling matches, and lusts for blood from his ringside seat. Her maternal grandfather is an invincible old stoic who suppresses pneumonia by cinching his waist with a leather harness - breaking his ribs in the process. Here we meet their complex, unpredictable sources. Allende's fiction often deals in flat folkloric archetypes: the patriarch, the dandy, the peasant. Celebration rather than despair provides the overriding tone. A real-time account of Paula's illness - the coma lasted a year - and her family's anguish intervenes with increasing insistency, until the two narrative threads dwindle to one, which snaps with the young woman's death in December 1992. Allende's best work to date.Ī mother trying to entertain a bedridden child, she piles on episode and anecdote in a brilliant flood of autobiographical reminiscence spanning three generations on four continents.

Then her agent, Carmen Balcells, showed up at the Madrid hospital with a stack of yellow note pads. When her beloved grandfather lay dying she wrote him a letter that became her first, and most successful, novel, 'The House of the Spirits.' Grieving for Chile under Pinochet, she wrote 'Of Love and Shadows.' As her first marriage collapsed, she invented the ebullient, upbeat heroine of 'Eva Luna.'īut when her 27-year-old daughter, Paula, fell ill in December 1991 with a hereditary metabolic disorder known as porphyria and quickly lapsed into a coma, the writer's courage failed her.

'ALL sorrows can be borne,' Isak Dinesen once said, 'if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.' That approach worked well for Isabel Allende - until lately.

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