Inside Isabel Allende’s world: writing, love and rag dolls

Author Isabel Allende talks to Jessica Salter about her writing routine, falling in love and the death of her daughter Paula.

Isabel Allende, 70, was born in Peru to Chilean parents, and grew up in Chile, until a military coup in 1975 forced her into exile. She moved first to Venezuela, where she lived for 13 years, and then to California, where she lives now with her second husband, Willie Gordon, also a writer. Allende has published 19 novels, which have been translated into 35 languages and sold more than 57 million copies; her latest, Maya’s Notebook (Fourth Estate), is out next week.

Routine Olivia and Dulce, our dogs, wake us up very early. I do an hour of meditation, then I have a shower at about 7am and I’m ready to start my day. I have two offices in the house – one with no internet or telephone, where I just write, and another one where I do all the mail and office stuff.I’ll have an apple or a cup of tea, but not a real lunch. At 6pm Willie and I sit down in front of the fire or out on the patio and have a drink – he has vodka and I have mineral water, which I put it in a martini glass so it looks like a drink. We cook dinner together and go to bed at about 9pm.

Mother My father left when I was three and I never saw him again. He was the Chilean ambassador in Lima, and my mother suddenly found herself alone with three babies. She became everything to me – my mother, father and a great friend. She’s 92 now and lives in Chile, and I see her about four times a year.

Revolution When my mother moved back to my grandfather’s house, where her brothers were still living, she had shelter and food, but no freedom. She had a limited education and now three babies and a failed marriage, which was rare in Chile in the 1940s. From a young age I saw how different my mother’s life was from the lives of my uncles. And also how my own life was different from my brothers’ – they were climbing trees and I had to stay inside knitting. I didn’t want that kind of life – I wanted to be a man. Later I realised that what I really wanted was to change the world.

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Andrei Makine: interview

Tim Martin speaks to Andrei Makine, a Russian novelist who has been compared to Stendhal, Tolstoy and Proust.

So classical in form and so precise in execution are Andreï Makine’s novels of Russia that one half-expects their author to be a kind of glittering book-world fossil, as old as the 20th century, wizened from a lifetime of unpacking the tragic ironies of Communism in gorgeously intricate prose miniatures. Makine has been compared to Stendhal, Tolstoy and Proust; our best historians of the Soviet era queue up to pronounce him one of the finest living writers on the period; and he is regularly tipped to be among the contenders for the next Nobel in literature.

So can the trim, courteous man in his mid-50s with the look of a Bergman monk, who pads downstairs from his hotel room and greets me in a perfect French bass with a discreet Russian roll on the R, really be him? I feel like asking for ID.

Makine’s own life, it turns out, has been almost as extraordinary as any one might invent for him. Born in Siberia in 1957 and raised partly in an orphanage and partly by his French-speaking grandmother, he served with the Russian military in Angola and Afghanistan, where he was blown up in a jeep and spent three weeks in a coma. Back in Russia, he studied to be a teacher.

“But my tongue was too long. I started talking about the things I’d seen in Afghanistan, and I soon realised I’d have to choose between being behind the Urals” – in a camp – “or on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I had the chance to escape and I escaped.”

He came to Paris, where he began to write novels in French. In 1997 a lean first period, in which he was forced to pretend that his books were translations from Russian originals before French publishers would agree to put them out, came to an end when his second novel, Le testament français, won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis.

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John le Carré gets personal for new novel

Spy writer John le Carré’s new novel, A Delicate Truth, hints at personal secrets and is his most autobiographical for years, says Jon Stock.

By Jon Stock

David Cornwell, better known as the spy writer John le Carré, has always enjoyed keeping secrets — the real-life inspiration for spymaster George Smiley, for example, or le Carré’s own role with British Intelligence. Sooner or later he breaks, telling us that Smiley was based on the Rev Vivian Green, his tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford, and that he once worked for MI5 and later MI6, but you can’t help feeling that the information is always extracted under duress.

So it is a pleasant surprise that le Carré has decided to reveal, without the use of electrodes or bright lights, that his much-anticipated 23rd novel is his most autobiographical for years, a book that “comes closer to my skin than any of my more recent novels”.

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She Left Me the Gun by Emma Brockes: review

The South African passport of Emma Brockes’s mother, Paula

Viv Groskop applauds a riveting unearthing of dark family secrets.

She Left Me the Gun is quite simply an extraordinary book. In the hands of any halfway decent author, this would be an incredible story: a mother with a mysterious South African past who arrived in England in her early twenties with a beautiful antique handgun and a mission to forget who she used to be. In the hands of a writer as gifted as Emma Brockes, it’s basically the perfect memoir: a riveting, authentic tale elegantly told.

Now an award-winning Guardian journalist, Brockes grew up as an only child. She knew how sensitive her mother, Paula, was about her upbringing. It wasn’t worth quizzing her on it too thoroughly. She knew that Paula’s mother died when she was two and she was raised by her father and stepmother, who went on to have another seven children. As the eldest, Paula helped raise her half-siblings. Then, as soon as she could, she left the country.

Paula married an Englishman, Emma’s father, in the Sixties. They met at the law firm where he was doing his articles and she was the bookkeeper. By the time Emma was born, they lived in a Buckinghamshire village where Paula would occasionally surprise her husband and daughter with glimpses into her childhood in “Zululand”, where there were hailstones the size of golf balls and snakes hanging from the trees. Even less occasionally she would mention her father. Violence was implied. And something to do with the gun.

When Paula died, her daughter slowly began to unravel what happened and discovered a devastating history of dysfunction, addiction and abuse. Few relatives in South Africa were untouched by the destruction wrought by Paula’s father. The testimony of the survivors – reluctantly persuaded by Brockes to talk – is moving and harrowing. But the most poignant passages come where the physical evidence is revealed in court papers. As an adult, Paula attempted to bring her father to trial, on behalf of one of her sisters. It was the collapse of that case – and the ongoing denial of her father and stepmother – that eventually made her leave her life behind.

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Patrick Ness: a Page in the Life

Patrick Ness

Helen Brown talks to the award-winning children’s writer Patrick Ness about his exceptional new novel for adults, The Crane Wife.

The sound that wakes George Duncan is “a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt”, but, being the kind of man he is, the hero of Patrick Ness’s new novel assumes it’s his bladder. In fact, it’s a dazzling white crane, brought down in George’s suburban garden by “some kind of terrifyingly proper arrow”. Stepping forward to help the bird, George finds himself in “one of those special corners of what’s real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life”. The next day a mysterious woman called Kumiko walks into George’s London print shop, and changes everything.

The Crane Wife is a special novel: a perfect fusion of surreal imagery and beautifully crafted internal logic. Turning it over in my hands once I’d finished, I began to think of it as the literary equivalent of a Japanese puzzle box with poetry, ideas and jokes twisting and sliding out of it at surprising angles.

“It’s based, of course, on the Japanese folk tale, which I first heard at kindergarten in Hawaii,” says Ness, leaning intently over a glass of pineapple juice (another Hawaiian hangover) in the café at Waterstones. Although he’s written for adults before, Ness is best known for his award-winning teen fiction. Now in his early forties, there’s still the intensity of adolescence in his speech, which punctuates passion with the odd, self-effacing: “Yeah, whaddever.”

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Derek B Miller: is it frivolous to be a novelist?

Derek B Miller: ‘Is being a novelist – however exciting or romantic – still somewhat frivolous?’

Novelist and international affairs specialist Derek B Miller muses on which of his two jobs is the more important – and the role storytelling plays in both.

I was tired and staring listlessly out of the airplane window as I flew back from Somalia to Kenya. I’d been to Hargeisa – Somalia’s second largest city – for work. I’m an international affairs specialist and had been looking at how the UN can learn from local communities, and apply that learning to the design of security and development projects. But I wasn’t thinking about work, I was thinking about the interesting people I’d met, and the stories they’d told me.

In fact, one personal observation I made while undertaking the policy design project was how dependent we all are – across cultures and through time – on telling stories. We certainly do not tell the same stories, or make sense of the world in the same way: The form is universal but the practice and meaning are not. Nevertheless, we all tell them, and this felt consequential.

I am also a novelist. While I was in Somalia, Faber & Faber was gearing up to publish my first novel, Norwegian by Night, in the UK. It is partly a chase-through-the-woods thriller, and partly the story of an old man coming to terms with the tragedies of his life while trying to save a young boy. I’d been asked in interviews whether my writing was taking me away from my seemingly more important “day job”. I’d been wondering that myself. Is being a novelist – however exciting or romantic – still somewhat frivolous? This observation about the universality of storytelling seemed to hold some promise of an answer.

If my novelist career is “fiction” and my day job is “non-fiction,” and storytelling is essential to both, what is the difference – if any – between them? After all, if writing in one area is “important” and the other “frivolous” than surely the differences must be stark.

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Literary death match: X Factor for books

Seven years after its launch, Literary Death Match is still pulling in bumper crowds. Rupert Hawksley got a ringside seat.

One boxing ring, four prize fighters, a rowdy, lager swilling crowd and … a whole lot of books. Welcome to Literary Death Match, a lively reading event that pits four authors against each other in a knockout competition. Each has exactly seven minutes to impress a panel of judges by reading an extract from their latest work with points awarded for “Literary Merit”, “Performance” and the cryptic “Intangibles”.

When Adrian Todd Zuniga launched the project in 2006, it caused a stir among critics who applauded his anarchic efforts to modernise the way in which we approach literature. The evenings began to take on a Bacchanalian nature, which attracted a young, avant-garde crowd. It wasn’t long before the likes of Moby and comedian Peter Serafinowicz were on board passing judgement on the brightest young authors from Ned Beauman to Christopher Brookmyre.

Such immediate success saw the project expand rapidly and to date, there have been 268 shows staged across the world, from Boston to Beijing, with no fewer than 68 performances last year alone. The seventh anniversary of its launch and the year’s first London show seemed the perfect opportunity to see it for myself.

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Tracy Chevalier: A Page in the Life

Tracy Chevalier tells Helen Brown about new book, The Last Runaway, and her heroine’s passion for rescuing slaves – and sewing.

Tracy Chevalier keeps a cracked, childhood bowl in her cupboard. “Nobody can eat from it,” she says, “except me and my sister. She knows where it is. But I don’t let my husband and son touch it because I know it’s gonna break some day and I don’t want one of them to be the one to break it because they’d feel terrible.” Grey on the outside, yellow inside, the precious bowl inspired a bonnet given to the English, Quaker heroine of her seventh novel when the girl arrives in Ohio in the mid-1850s. “The grey,” says Chevalier, “is dutiful and solid and then the yellow is for stepping forward and doing the right thing.”

The right thing is helping slaves fleeing the antebellum South to find freedom in Canada. Although there was no slavery in Ohio, the Fugitive Slave Act punished any accomplice by exorbitant fines and confiscation of property. And as young Honor Bright discovers when she reaches the Quaker settlement where she’s promised to keep her sparkier sister company, members of this struggling pioneer community do not want to get involved. These weather-beaten farmers have larders to fill for the long, barren winters. And the violent local slave-hunter is always on the prowl. They would prefer Honor to keep her head bowed over her exquisite quilting, and ignore the sounds of people cowering in the woods.

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You can’t get this book from Amazon

One of the ways in which bookshops can fight back against online retailers is to give the customer something more than just the book itself.

By Alexander McCall Smith

Some years ago I went into a house without books. It was in the Cayman Islands, and it was not an inexpensive place – a modernist cube right on the shore, with white carpets throughout to match the white of the beach that made the front garden. Large windows, wall size, looked out over an almost clichéd Caribbean view: turquoise ocean, a reef, sea-grape trees. But no books; wherever I looked, there were no books.

If it is bad enough going into a house with no books, how much worse is it to arrive in a town with no bookshop. That experience, unfortunately, has become quite common these days.

If books are part of the soul of any house, then bookshops are the equivalent for a town. A High Street without a bookshop is a street given over to the purely material needs of shoppers – food, clothing, hardware: there is nothing for the soul.

Of course, economics has little time for all this. Bookshops exist because people want to buy books in them, and if they do not want to buy them there, then bookshops will close. Economics ultimately pays scant attention to cultural claims.

The owners of bookshops understand this only too well. For them, one of the most threatening developments of the recent past – and which saw the closure of 400 bookshops last year – has been the rise of online shopping. It is just too easy – and who can say they have resisted the temptation – to press a button and have a book drop through the letter-box the next morning. And if it is pointed out to us that buying books this way will bring bricks and mortar shops to their knees, we may say: “Yes, but the convenience…”

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John Agard: ‘I feel an empathy with the bad characters’

Alternative Anthem

Ahead of receiving the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the poet John Agard tells Felicity Capon about his poetry, growing up in Guyana and what he thinks of British society today.

Raucous laughter emerges from the studio where the poet John Agard is being photographed. The photographer asks him to leave his coat on, and Agard cheerfully agrees, telling us in his deep Caribbean voice that it will “make him look like he just arrived from the tropics”. Dressed in a jaunty hat and jazzy shirt, casually rolling a cigarette as he talks, Agard is warm and thoughtful. I am told that his favourite place to write is in a pub with a pint of Guinness and I get the impression, as we speak, that he is pretty down to earth.

One of the most highly regarded poets in the UK, Agard has won many awards. Today his poetry will be recognised by the Queen, when he is awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The award was first instituted in 1933 by King George V, and the recipient is chosen by a committee chaired by the Poet Laureate. Past winners include Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes, Norman MacCaig and Derek Walcott – a cross-section of poets that Agard describes as “good company”.

Though he is touched by the honour, for Agard a medal from the Queen means as much as, for example, the letter of congratulations he recently received from his old sixth-form teacher, or the support of friends in Lewes, Sussex where he now lives.

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