4-22-08, 9:55 am

The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende New York, Harper, 2008.

Original source: Morning Star

Isabel Allende's first and most famous novel, The House of the Spirits, is a family saga that also conveys an atmosphere of workers' struggle against the tyranny of the Chilean landowners. Its characters include strong-minded women attracted to socialism and rebelling against patriarchy. It is a compelling picture of love and politics.

She depicts the brutal military coup against the elected socialist government, in which her uncle, president Salvador Allende, was killed.

Augusto Pinochet's victory dashed her hopes for Chile. She turned to romantic novels, such as Daughters of Fortune, seen by some as an allegory of feminism, and moved to California.

The Sum of Our Days is a memoir in which she speaks to her daughter Paula, who tragically died of a blood disorder.

She describes her tempestuous life in a large house often filled, Chilean-style, with her tribe of family and friends.

She gathers together stories of a dozen self-styled witches or 'Sisters of Disorder,' with a liberal lifestyle and spiritual retreats laced with marijuana.

But she was still famous internationally and tells of the fun that she had when she joined Meryl Streep, other Hollywood stars and Vanessa Redgrave for the filming of her first novel. She also carried the Olympic flag in the winter games in Italy in 2006, representing Latin America and following behind Sophia Loren.

When she went back to Chile to attend the film's premiere, she found that the army, the press and the judicial system still sympathised with Pinochet, who only lost support when his theft, tax evasion and corruption came out.

'The same people who had overlooked tortures and murders could not forgive the millions that he had stolen,' she says.

She admits that she likes to tell others what to do and even calls herself a 'mother-in-law from hell' when she enters the home of her son and his partner uninvited and rearranges the furniture to suit a new rug that she has bought for them.

A therapist advises her second husband Willie and herself to lighten their lives. They go to learn ballroom dancing, but the project founders when she objects to the convention that the man leads.

She also tells of the time when she once tried to intervene in San Francisco's sadomasochists' carnival, where a bruised and screaming young, topless woman was being lashed by another woman.

Allende's writing is characterised by touches of magic realism, which ignores the distinction between fantasy and reality. When someone commands objects to move about the room in The House of The Spirits, it can be seen as a device for questioning the existing state of affairs.

In The Sum of Our Days, it has a different function. When a flame goes out and leaves a hole in the middle of the candle, it is a sign to Allende that her daughter's spirit still exists. She retreats from reality into superstition because of the pain that she feels.

She writes in a light, pointed style, often with poignancy as well as with spirit, but the story is too discursive and lacking in narrative drive to be classed with her best writing.

In the end, she seeks out a quiet place to live where she and Willie can just look after each other. But she quotes the Buddhist belief that, although life is a river carrying us to our final destination, we have oars to guide our raft. Her motto is: 'Row, Willie.'

Should the flag of socialism fly again over the presidential palace in Chile in her lifetime, she will surely celebrate its forward march in her own, inimitable style of magic and socialist realism.

From Morning Star