Isabel Allende’s My Invented Country is a beautiful portrayal of the act of invention in the creative process. Where there is something missing in life, she finds through invention. Where there is no home, she creates with details only visible to her perceptive eye.
Although I want to be a writer with every bone in my body - and simply thinking of doing something else sounds like torture - I am finding the process of success extremely daunting, scary, and almost impossible. Basically, it is harder than anything I have ever tried to do, maybe because I want it so badly. I mention this because Isabel Allende is a successful writer, and in My Invented Country, she transcends her own exile through the process of invention, creating, and writing, while speaking about the process through a creative narrative, full of exploration.
My favorite excerpt from the book, probably because it resonates with my own desires to be a writer, is this: “What I learned then [working as a journalist] helps now in my writing: working under pressure, conducting an interview, doing research, using the language efficiently. ” (128) She mentions a “book is not an end in itself,” nor is writing, and by making this apparent through her writing is both insightful and appeals to me in many levels as a reader, and writer.
My Invented Country is not only an exploration of where she is from. It seems to be an exploration of how, and why she is who she is, even as a writer. She speaks about her other novels as if they are her children - “I came across a collection of Russian novels and the complete works of Henri Troyat...I read and reread those books, and years later I named my son Nicholas after one of Troyat’s characters...” (116) Even her father abandoning her is a theme she admits to using in her stories, scattered with abandoned children.
Her descriptions are rich in flavor and dense in detail. She intertwines the land with the people of Chile, so that they are not one without the other: “We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency. In Santiago, the temperatures are worse than in madrid; in summer we die of the heat and in winter of the cold, but no one has air conditioning or decent heating, because that would be tantamount to admitting that the climate isn’t as good as they say it is.” (48) Although most of the book is about Chile and its' people, generalizations only someone from a culture can portray, her knowledge of the land and its' people appeal to her ethos.
The writing itself is a naked revelation of her own relationship with a country she feels she is no longer part of, yet is attached to in' culture and identity. Her use of nostalgia appeals to pathos because it is something we can all relate to, exile or not. In My Invented Country, Allende creates a place where she belongs, wherever she is. After all, she is the inventor of her own country.
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