REVIEW In her memoir, Allende meanders through Chile

Though the book has contradictions, it also has its charms.
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile," by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins, $23.95)
Isabel Allende has written a dizzying, contradictory, maddening memoir.
One would expect nothing less from the author of such magic-realism masterpieces as "The House of the Spirits" and "Eva Luna." And yet, "My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile" is oddly hollow when compared to these works. The same background that served Allende so well in her fiction fails her in this autobiographical exploration.
Sparked by her grandson's generous observation that she had at least three more years to live and a stranger's inquiry about the role nostalgia plays in her novels, Allende set off on an oblique look back at her life in relation to her native land, mixing memory vignettes with breezy historical washes and (often ridiculously) generalized depictions of Chileans and their culture.
Those looking for a cohesive portrait of Allende's past will not find it here.
Warmth and wit
Certainly, the book is not without its charms. Allende writes with wit and warmth, particularly in her childhood memories of her grandfather, a man who "lived nearly a century with never a sign of a single loose screw."
But Allende seems unwilling, or unable, to make the many strands of her past coalesce into something meaningful. More than once, she shies away from an in-depth description of a time or event that seems promising, on the lame rationale that she has written about it elsewhere. Instead, she offers sweeping generalizations about Chile that are amusing at first but quickly grow stale, leaving the reader without any sense of what Chileans actually are like.
"We Chileans," she tells readers are "fascinated with psychopaths and murderers," "enchanted by states of emergency," "bothered by others' success" and "magnanimous during disasters."
Surely these stereotypes could just as easily be applied to the people in Allende's current homeland, America. But Allende charges ahead, tossing out so many cavalier summations of her family and Chile that she inevitably contradicts herself. She asserts that Chileans have "a tendency to speak in falsetto," then remarks on the next page that Chileans "speak very low."
Giving up focus
These meanderings and contradictions would be forgivable if rendered in the service of a larger, compelling narrative. But one can wander for only so long without wondering where, exactly, one is being led. By choosing to explore Chile through nostalgia's smeared lens, Allende forfeits such focus.
Toward the end of "My Invented Country," as explanation for one of many tangents, she writes: "... I need to pick up the main thread of this account, if there is any thread in all this meandering. But that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. ... I've tried to arrange my thoughts according to themes of periods of my life, but it's seemed artificial to me because memory twists in and out, like an endless Moebius strip."
One wishes she had acted on this feeling of artificiality, and tried for a more nuanced exploration.