Latin Destinies

...Because her book is also a roman a clef set in Chile that culminates with the deaths of her uncle, President Salvador Allende, and the poet Pablo Neruda (both of whom appear thinly disguised), it practically cries out to be judged in terms of its politics and literary pretensions...

...I saw a good deal of Chile in the period immediately preceding Salvador Allende's election and the coup that toppled him...

...Her father, an American soldier, disappeared in Cuba at the time of the American attempt to liberate the island from Spain a decade earlier, and she discovers that he is still living there quite happily with a black mistress...

...What has Harriet Winslow learned...

...And with American culture as something more than a menace to the good life...

...In the end, the madam of a flourishing bordello, whom Esteban once lent money, manages to spring Alba from her tormentors—after she has been raped by the grandson of a peasant woman once raped by her grandfather...

...The politics of this novel is another matter...

...It swings so abruptly from fantasy to reality to political propaganda that it is difficult enough to follow without the constant changes from third to first person narrative...

...Each is strong, admirable and unique, although not depicted with quite enough depth perception to enable a reader to share their passions...

...But I detested Neruda's lifelong and generally concealed subservience to Soviet Communism, which finally led to a break between us...

...When he discovers that Arroyo's real father was Miranda, however, and that the bandit chief is holding the deed to the property as a hedge against the future, he steals the deed, determined to discredit one more fake...

...Villa, as we know, fights his way to Mexico City, there to succumb to the brutality, machismo and corruption that have become the heritage of the Mexican Revolution...

...Similarly, notwithstanding Vargas Llosa's inimitable fluid dialogue, especially in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, why Peru has been so ungovernable remains an enigma, whereas The House of the Spirits provides a clear impression of Chile...

...The protagonist of the title is Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914...

...At 72, embittered by separation from his wife and the tragic death of his two sons, Bierce drifted across the border into Mexico where Pancho Villa was rounding up local bandit guerrillas to march south, join up with Zapata, and overthrow Victoriano Huerta, the corrupt and alcoholic general who had murdered Francisco Ma-dero, Mexico's first freely elected president and the idealistic leader of the Revolution's constitutionalists...

...The standard "liberal" (and Communist) explanation for the coup has always been that U.S...

...The House of the Spirits By Isabel Allende Translated by Magda Bodin Knopf...

...The embittered writer has long since given up on democracy and other American notions...

...Andinthis, his shortest, most sharply focused work of fiction, it supplies the power and is the subject...

...As for the causes of her uncle's overthrow, there is much evidence that the military—who had been backing the Socialist President solidly for a year— finally decided to intervene in response to a wave of popular indignation...

...The coffin containing the remains is given to Harriet, who takes it across the Rio Grande to be buried "legitimately" as her long-lost father...

...Surely you're intelligent enough to realize that the United States is' not just' a country of imperialists, materialists, alien baiters, racists, and culture haters...

...Every story," says his biographer, "is a single episode of conflict: son against father, lover against rival, a house— one's own—destroyed, a spy—one's brother—shot...

...Bierce is aided in this project by the novel's third principal character, Harriet Winslow...

...17.95...

...the contrast between the civilian's preconceptions of military glory and the soldier's experience of ugliness and brutality...

...The voice shifts accomplish nothing except confusion, maximized at the conclusion when the first person narrator himself changes persona...

...Presumably she has imbibed some of the Indian values: how to make much out of a little, how to treat sex as a gift of the body rather than as an escape from the mind or a substitute for religion, how to enjoy the moment and not fret about the passage of time...

...Trueba turns a decaying family property, Tres Marias, into a prosperous farm, paying his indentured laborers starvation wages and raping their women...

...His wife Clara, who comes to hate him, preserves her sanity by turning into a clairvoyant eccentric and bringing up her children and grandchildren to nurture eccentricities of their own, mostly benign ones, until they drift into political radicalism...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Mexican Journal," "A Short History of Mexico" More than 25 years ago in Mexico City, I asked Carlos Fuentes, who had yet to write his first book, why he could not be detached about the United States...

...He is the very epitome of the Latin American patron: prideful, macho, nationalistic, insanely violent...

...Perhaps I should acknowledge my own prejudices, if such they are...

...368 pp...

...copper interests, abetted by the American Embassy, conspired with the military and supplied the bombs as well as the two pilots required to knock out the Palace— a scenario Isabel Allende subscribes to, despite the absence of any evidence to support it...

...I stayed with Pablo Neruda at Isla Negra, confirmed in my feeling (which Isabel Allende shares) that he is the great poet of this century...

...To refer to Neruda's" verses of freedom and justice" without any reference to the ambivalence in the poet and ideologue, as the novelist does, in my view is either dishonest or naive...

...That the reactionary patriarch of The House of the Spirits, Esteban Trueba, backs the coup is wholly believable...

...A misanthrope and satirist with a biting wit, his targets included millionaires, labor leaders, women, dogs, and war...

...Another minor flaw is the novel's mood...

...Because he is fearful that the murder of an American will give the gringos across the border an excuse to intervene, he has the body exhumed and "executed" a second time...

...To be a gringo in Mexico, he tells himself cynically, "ah, that's euthanasia...

...At this point Villa appears on the scene...

...The three women of the family— Clara, her daughter Blanca, and her granddaughter Alba—are the real heroes of lsabel Allende's chronicle...

...The reader is not obliged to wrestle with the strenuous avant-gardism of Fuentes and Donoso either, and as a result can enjoy her tale...

...Isabel Allende fits very well into the young yet already hoary Garcia Mar-quez "tradition...

...Fuentes does not spell it out...

...Point by point, yes," he replied, "but back of my every effort to be fair, the fact that I'm a Mexican would make it impossible for me to be psychologically impervious to the sheer weight that a more powerful, more homogeneous neighbor imposes upon us, and not to resent the necessarily unconscious sense of complacent superiority which accompanies that pressure...

...Thus the author manages to find justice in the most horrendous acts of violence...

...She is a young, idealistic and naive spinster from the U.S...

...In a society such as Chile's, where order is equated with exploitation, corruption and greed, idealism finds no other outlet...

...In this the Latin American novel takes a new turn: The first major fiction by a woman is, in addition, the first to define with sensitivity and knowledge the position of Latin women...

...who came to the plantation in answer to an advertisement in a Washington newspaper that was inserted before the Mirandas fled abroad in the wake of Villa's sweep of the northern provinces...

...But her resentments come to a head when the bandit chief kills the old gringo, whom she had begun to regard as her true father, in order to repossess the deed to the plantation...

...The 700 per cent inflation was wiping out everyone, poor as well as rich, and the illegal seizure of farms in the south was being condoned, if not abetted, by the national police...

...Hoping to face a Mexican firing squad, Bierce arrives at the Miranda plantation currently held by a local bandit chief, General Tomas Arroyo, the head of Villa's Northern Division...

...So the old gringo does die "in action" as he had planned, with the burning deed in his hand...

...Today, despite many impressive novels to his credit—"Mexico's greatest living novelist" his American publisher calls him, probably without exaggeration—not to mention his being a renowned teacher of comparative literature at Harvard, Fuentes still feels that pressure...

...He has no interest in the Mexican Revolution...

...Only Harriet appears to learn something from the complex turn of events I have painstakingly (and I hope accurately) unraveled from the thoughts and conversations about the principal characters' dreams, which constitute the poetic burden of the novel...

...She proposed to teach the children of the Revolution the values of American democracy and know-how...

...Could one hope that in his next novel Fuentes might deal with these virtues positively...

...Harriet develops an affection for her compatriot, the old gringo, although not before she has been had by General Arroyo...

...It shows that they do manage to exert power in their own ways, even in a land and a household governed by macho tyrants...

...and that he eventually regrets it when his beloved granddaughter Alba, who was having an affair with a Leftist firebrand, is picked up and tortured by the military police following the coup, is equally credible...

...No doubt that would have an impact on younger Latin American writers like Isabel Allende, whose The House ofthe Spirits leans heavily on the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and the "big" novels written subsequently by Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso and others...

...the American j ournalist and short-story writer...

...At least that much of a skeletal background is needed to understand the complex ideological issues at stake in The Old Gringo, but Fuentes chooses instead to present his three principal characters in terms of their frustrated dreams...

...Though her first novel lacks the poetry, wit and extravagant fantasy of the Colombian writer's seminal work, it makes up for this with a stronger sense of reality and a more endearing family of characters that plays out its comedies and tragedies over almost a century...

...She is grateful to Arroyo for introducing her to sex (Mexican style...