Eva Luna

Eva Luna, born to an indigenous servant in an unnamed South American country modeled closely on Venezuela, moves through a succession of households as a child, a blind woman's companion, a Yugoslav prospector's charge, a repressive family's maid, and Allende builds the early chapters almost as a catalogue of the arrangements poor women without family protection are forced to accept in order to survive. What Eva carries out of each household intact is storytelling itself, a skill she first develops as literal currency, trading tales for food and shelter, before it becomes the means by which she eventually writes herself into economic independence as a telenovela scriptwriter, one of the only trades in the novel that pays a woman for her imagination rather than her body or her labor.

Rolf Carlé, an Austrian immigrant filmmaker whose own family history includes his father's unexamined participation in Nazi violence, runs as Eva's structural counterpart for most of the book, his documentary camera doing for the visual record of the country's political unrest what Eva's storytelling does for its private, unrecorded lives. Allende keeps the two narratives separate for most of the novel's length before letting them intersect, a structural choice that argues invention and documentation are not opposites but two methods of doing the same necessary work, holding onto a version of events that power would rather nobody kept.

Allende frames Eva Luna as if Eva herself were narrating the book we're reading, collapsing the distance between the character who tells stories for a living and the novel that exists because of that gift, a device that turns Eva's eventual authorship of hit telenovelas into a wink at Allende's own career, since Allende had worked in Venezuelan television before turning to fiction. The self-reflexive frame lets the novel argue for popular, commercial storytelling, exactly the kind of melodrama serious literature usually looks down on, as a legitimate and even essential way for people without institutional power to shape how their own country understands itself.