Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

First published: 1987 (English translation, 1988)

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The middle and late twentieth century

Locale: An unnamed South American country

Principal Characters:

• Eva Luna, the narrator, an illiterate girl who becomes a television scriptwriter
• Consuelo, her mother, a servant
• Rolf Carlé, Eva’s lover, a photojournalist
• Elvira, a cook who rears Eva after Consuelo dies
• Huberto Naranjo (Comandante Rogelio), a street boy who becomes a guerrilla leader
• Melesio (Mimí), Eva’s friend, a female impersonator
• Riad Halabí (The Turk), a shopkeeper, Eva’s benefactor
• Zulema, his unfaithful wife

The Novel

Eva Luna is the story of a poor girl with a great gift for storytelling who, because of her indomitable spirit, manages to survive a perilous youth and become a successful television scriptwriter. The title character of the novel is also the narrator. Even when Eva herself could not have witnessed what she describes, the implication is that she is faithfully reporting what she has been told by those who were present and thus, in a sense, making those events a part of her own narrative. Since all the people mentioned affect Eva’s own history, these stories are an essential part of her life.

The book begins with Eva’s birth, the product of the sole sexual encounter of her parents. Her mother, Consuelo, a servant of unknown parentage, had decided to console an Indian gardener who was presumed to be dying from snakebite. When he recovered and went back to the jungle, he left Consuelo pregnant. Even though she died when Eva was only six years old, Consuelo remained an important part of her life, primarily because she told her such fascinating stories.

Allende then moves back in time to introduce Rolf Carlé, the son of Lukas Carlé, an Austrian schoolmaster. Rolf was a baby when his father went to war; during his father’s absence, Rolf has made him into a hero. Unfortunately, when Lukas returns, he is so tyrannical that by comparison the Russian occupation troops seem angelic.

Although Allende does not bring Eva and Rolf together until almost the end of her novel, she continues to trace his adventures as well as hers. For example, in one chapter Eva tells about her mother’s death, her employment in a household where only the cook, Elvira, treats her with kindness, and her meeting with a street boy, Huberto Naranjo, who becomes her protector. In the next, she describes Rolf’s reaction when his father is murdered by his students: a feeling of guilt by association so consuming that he cannot eat and, as a result, is shipped off to kindly relatives in South America. As Eva points out, when Rolf arrives in the German settlement of La Colonia, he is not far from the place where she is growing up.

Deposited with first one employer and then another by the mad mulatto godmother who rules her life, Eva never feels secure. Nevertheless, she occasionally does exhibit her spirit. On one memorable occasion, because she is disgusted with the cabinet minister who spends every day on an ornate chamberpot that she must empty, she deliberately pours the contents over his head. Fleeing from his wrath, Eva finds her old friend Huberto, who places her in the care of a famous madam, La Señora, and her best friend, Melesio, who calls himself Mimí whenever he performs as a singer, dressed in women’s clothes. Eva’s life with these two of society’s outcasts is supremely happy.

Unfortunately, a political uprising brings the idyll to an end. This time, Eva is rescued by Riad Halabí, called “the Turk” by the people of Agua Santa, the isolated village where he keeps a shop. A man so compassionate that he covers his unsightly harelip with a handkerchief for fear of offending his companions, Riad Halabí has a wife, Zulema, who cannot endure him. During one of Riad’s absences, Eva is horrified when Zulema seduces Riad’s young cousin Kamel. After Kamel realizes what he has done and runs away, the lovesick Zulema kills herself. Because she was the one to find the body, Eva is arrested, and though she is finally cleared and released, she is forced to leave the village and Riad, even though he is now as much in love with her as she is with him.

In the final section of Eva Luna, the lives of Eva, Mimí, Huberto, and Rolf become intertwined. Believing herself to be in love with Huberto, who is now a guerrilla leader called Comandante Rogelio, Eva becomes his mistress. Meanwhile, with Mimí’s encouragement, she begins writing and selling scripts for television serials that become so popular that the authorities attempt to influence their content. In the guerrilla camp, Eva meets Rolf, now a documentary filmmaker. When Eva is told that she is in danger from the authorities, Rolf takes her to La Colonia. In that Edenic setting, Eva and Rolf discover that they have at last found the mates they have sought for so long. In time, Eva says, their love eventually wore out, or, if one prefers another ending, it lasted forever.

The Characters

Eva Luna is not only Allende’s protagonist and narrator but also the character whom the reader comes to know best. As she tells the story of her life, Eva seems to be supremely honest. For example, she admits that she is often rebellious, but without that trait, she comments, she might not have survived. For someone who has suffered as much as she has, she is amazingly devoid of self-pity. When she recalls one of the beatings administered by her godmother, Eva simply says that the neighbors came over to stop the beating and then used salt to cure her wounds. The very fact that she does not attempt to elicit pity makes one more sympathetic to her plight. The reason Eva can distance herself from such unhappy events, as well as from happy ones such as her days and nights of lovemaking, is that above all, she is a storyteller. Even when life betrays her, she can rewrite it in her imagination, as she probably is doing at the end of the novel when she imagines an everlasting love.

Of all the other characters in the novel, Rolf is the most complex. In one sense, he is shown as a male equivalent to Eva. Because both of them have been so mistreated as children—Eva by her godmother and her employers, Rolf by his father—their commitment to unqualified love seems almost miraculous. One must give both of them much of the credit for preserving their souls as well as their bodies. While his father was still alive, Rolf worried more about his sister than about himself, and after his father was killed, Rolf was so shocked at his own feelings that he became ill. Like Eva, Rolf refuses to turn bitter, and thus he is able to respond to kindness, in his case to the warmth of the “uncle” and “aunt” at La Colonia. Although as a photojournalist Rolf has no doubt learned to be objective, Eva’s insistence that he is more rational than she may not be accurate. After all, she also mentions a time that Rolf burst into tears when he suddenly remembered one particularly miserable segment of his childhood. It is hardly unusual for the actions of a character to reveal more than a writer’s or a lover’s description of him.

Some of Allende’s other characters, such as La Señora, Melesio/Mimí, and even the gallant Colonel Tolomeo Rodríguez, although not examined in as much detail as Eva and Rolf, are nevertheless fully formed and plausible. On the other hand, one of the principal characters, Huberto Naranjo, remains shadowy. Admittedly, the author spends considerable time explaining Huberto’s conversion from vandalism to Cuban-style communism. Exactly who he is remains less clear than what he is. It may be that Allende means to use Huberto primarily to represent the macho ideal of manhood, offering protection to women but denying them equality.

In relatively minor roles, one is happy to settle for the outrageous and often hilarious caricatures that make Allende’s fiction such a delight to read. The godmother with the two-headed baby, the cabinet minister on his chamberpot, the cook who sleeps in her coffin, and the two nubile sisters who initiate Rolf into erotic pleasures all contribute to the magical quality of the novel.

Any consideration of Allende’s characterization must stress that this novel is presented as Eva’s story, not Allende’s. If, as she insists throughout, Eva is creating this novel rather than dutifully relating it, even such matters as how each of the other characters is treated reflect Eva’s judgments and, in turn, reveal her character, thus giving the work still another dimension.

Critical Context

With Eva Luna, Isabel Allende returned to the kind of fiction that had established her reputation. Her first novel, La casa de los espiritus (1982; The House of the Spirits, 1985), was written in the tradition of Magical Realism, like the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, the noted Latin American author and Nobel laureate to whom Allende acknowledges her indebtedness. Although in De amor y de sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows, 1987) Allende continued to explore the theme of repression and political tyranny, in form that novel was realistic or even naturalistic. Although it was an exciting story, it lacked the mysterious, enchanted, and often haunted atmosphere that readers saw again in Eva Luna.

Eva and Rolf appear again in Cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991), a collection of twenty-three stories supposedly invented by Eva at the request of her lover. In the novel that followed, El Plan Infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan, 1993), Allende for the first time set a work in the United States. Her North American protagonist is a rootless wanderer, not unlike Eva Luna, who searches for love and justice in a world that sometimes seems to contain only brutality and betrayal.

Because of her technical virtuosity and her transcendent humanistic vision, Allende is considered to be one of the most gifted Latin American writers of the late twentieth century. Her importance is perhaps best stated in the frequently quoted words of Alexander Coleman, who wrote in The New York Times Book Review (May 12, 1985) that Allende was “the first woman to approach on the same scale as the others [male Latin American novelists] the tormented patriarchal world of traditional Hispanic society.”

Bibliography

Allende, Isabel. “An Interview with Isabel Allende.” Interview by Elyse Crystall, Jill Kyhnheim, and Mary Layoun. Contemporary Literature 33 (Winter, 1992): 584-611. A wide-ranging discussion with Allende about her career; the influence of the English language on her writing and how it has shaped her novels that are written in Spanish; and the political and spiritual elements in her stories. Briefly touches on Eva Luna.

Bader, Eleanor J. “A Life Like a Dimestore Romance.” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 4 (Winter, 1989): 5. An unfavorable review, calling the characters in Eva Luna a “largely unsympathetic, unlikable lot—cynical, angry, and manipulative,” who therefore fail to interest the reader. After calling the plot “confusing” and “unbelievable,” Bader concludes by saying that Allende could do better than write “a life that reads like dimestore romance.”

Karrer, Wolfgang. “Transformation and Transvestism in Eva Luna by Isabel Allende.” In Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels, edited by Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Aguirre Rehbein. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Explains how Allende uses mythic elements from diverse sources. Karrer’s discussion of the “semiotic code of clothing” throughout the novel, with its “theme of magical transformation,” is particularly helpful. Even though Allende has Eva accept her gender role, much in the novel supports more radical possibilities.

Rehbein, Edna Aguirre. “The Act/Art of Narrating in Eva Luna.” In Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels, edited by Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Aguirre Rehbein. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Differentiates between the multiple roles of Eva Luna as a fictional character in the “act” of narrating and as a writer interested in her “art.” As the novel proceeds, Eva can be seen to develop in narrative skill. The work is a “prime example of Isabel Allende’s belief in the magical power of words.”

Roof, Maria. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Isabel Allende, and the Empowerment of Third World Women.” CLA Journal 39 (June, 1996): 401-416. Roof examines Allende’s novels using W. E. B. Du Bois’s theories concerning the marginalized African sector of United States society. She discusses Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, new forms of female protagonists, and the limitations on Allende’s heroines.

Rotella, Pilar. “Allende’s Eva Luna and the Picaresque Tradition.” In Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels, edited by Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Aguirre Rehbein. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Rotella discusses Eva Luna in terms of Allende’s feminism, focusing particularly on the figure of the pícara, who traditionally uses her body as well as her brains in outwitting her opponents. Although Eva is “surprisingly passive and dependent” for a pícara, she does possess the prime qualification, “inventiveness.” The admixture of romance makes Eva Luna even more typical of the picaresque genre.