Isabel AllendeFourth Estate, £17.99
'EVERY life can be told as a novel," remarks Allende near the start of this memoir covering the years since 1992 when she lost her daughter, Paula. Written in the style of a long letter to t
he much-missed girl, this book about the lives of her family is told just like a novel, even beginning with a hook: "I always approach the eighth of January with trembling."
Allende, we learn, uses this date every year to start writing a new book or else risk a year of devastating bad luck. It is her grave preoccupation with superstition, tradition and spiritual enlightenment that colours and shapes this piece of autobiographical writing. The Sum Of Our Days is a book about loss, about healing; but most of all about the dynamics of a close family.
The Sum of Our Days makes frequent references to her dead daughter's spirit, which Allende believes guides her family, answering their prayers and causing good things to happen. Although to the reader this can seem misguided, even irritating, the author's grief-stricken denial of the finality of death is understandable and poignant. Her deep-rooted conviction that the living and the spirit world can interact will come as no surprise to those who read her debut 1982 novel The House Of The Spirits.
In fact, Allende is a firm believer in all things spiritual and belongs to the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder, a group of "six fiftyish witches" who pray for each other in times of trouble. In this memoir, the dead drift about the house moving furniture, making noises or being reborn in the physical appearances of other, living people. The ominous purple shadow of porphyria – an inherited condition that killed Allende's daughter, nearly killed her son and has been diagnosed in her grandchildren – haunts the book, and her life.
Having family nearby, dead or alive, matters in a way only understood by her Chilean relatives; she is keen to saturate her Californian home with the noise and chaos of children and grandchildren.
At times one feels sorry for the new members of the 'clan', those young men or women who marry into it and then face the strong, exacting but loving personality of the matriarchal Allende.
It's hard not to pity the girl who, hand-picked by Allende for her divorced son Nico, is deemed to be a bit of a wimp for crying when she witnesses a man being shot to death.But Allende is quick to confess her own flaws, redeeming herself as an honest and likeable character, albeit a strong-tempered and impatient one: "I was a pernicious mother-in-law," she admits.
Like Virginia Woolf, Allende makes sense of the world around her by capturing it with her pen. When the ability to write disappears, her distress is almost tangible. She goes to extraordinary lengths to become re-inspired, at one point drinking a lethal brew concocted by Amazonian Indians with the express intention of producing visions. After four days of hallucinating, vomiting and writhing about on the floor, Allende comes back from the dead full of ideas for her new books. By the end of her memoir, similar stories of the search for artistic fulfilment have become so familiar to the reader that they fail to cause much surprise. It's all just part of the peculiarly deep and spiritual nature of the author.
The memoir delves frequently into the seductive prose used to such mesmerising effect in Allende's novels: "I went out onto the balcony and waited for morning in a polychrome wood swing with topaz-coloured silk cushions. A climbing jasmine and a tree with large white flowers were releasing that courtesan's fragrance I had noted in our room." Lines such as these remind us that Allende is a true mistress of her craft.
Advising her husband on how to go about writing his first novel, she observes that "writing is like magic tricks; it isn't enough to pull rabbits from a hat, you have to do it with elegance and in a convincing manner". The Sum Of Our Days convinces throughout, an elegant reminder of how life influences art, and art makes sense of life.
The full article contains 729 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
