There is certainly a fair amount of sex, but women are often the initiators and they retain their complete personhood regardless of the escapes they do or don’t get up to. There’s a guerrilla fighter, and various wars go on in the background (it is the 20th century after all), but the novel is primarily concerned with how homes are made (I originally typed ‘maid,’ which is appropriate!) and relationships forged and how people carry on in the face of life, tragic and silly and always surprising. I love magical realism, but many of its most famous authors are male, so it was neat to see the same ‘type’ of storyline told from a completely different perspective. What I think I loved most, other than the pervasive insistence on the power of stories to people and their lives, was the thoroughly domestic attitude of the novel. I shan’t tell you any more of the plot that that, because you should discover it for yourself. Meanwhile, all of the important people she meets in her life come with extensive back stories, all shared with the reader by Eva herself, whose God-given talent is story telling. So! Eva Luna is born to a maid in an unnamed South American country (I suspect it’s not Allende’s native Chile, though, since it has rain forests) and follows an almost picaresque route to adulthood that happens to reflect her country’s history. I loved this wholeheartedly, and the fact that the narrator and I happen to share a name is just icing on the cake. This is straight-up magical realism at its best, with crazy characters getting into unlikely scenarios all tied together with a narrative voice whose storytelling ability is simply marvelous.

Eva Luna is one of Isabel Allende’s earlier novels, and its youthful exuberance simply shines through.

The short stories of eva luna