Re-read review: Eva Luna, by Isabel Allende
“My name is Eva…I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up among ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory”
So begins this dreamlike tale. Despite all the plot threads coming neatly together at the end the story meanders in an unusual way…which is perhaps why I got nearly 100 pages in before being sure that, yes, this was at least the second time I had read it! That isn’t a bad thing, really: the writing is beautiful, and I didn’t mind discovering it as if for the first time all over again. The way Allende uses Eva’s life journey as a way to explore a time and place and to introduce the reader to a range of distinctive side characters is rather similar to ‘Daughter of Fortune’ – though overall I like that book better, for reasons I will explain in a moment.
The story spans the early to mid-20th century somewhere (nowhere? everywhere?) in Latin America – an unnamed country with landscapes ranging from jungle to pampas, oil reserves like Venezuela, German colonies like Argentina or Uruguay1, and gringo interference, guerillas, and military juntas like most. Eva’s mother Consuelo was a red-haired orphan found wandering on a jungle riverbank by missionaries who became a housekeeper to an eccentric professor2, her father a nearly silent Indian gardener. Eva’s mother dies when she is six – though she often sees her spirit – and she is looked after by her madrina (godmother), the mulatta cook who helped birth her. When the professor also dies a year later, her godmother sends her out to work as a maid to help support them both. It is in her first job that she meets Elvira, the black servant of a pair of elderly siblings, who Eva comes to think of as her grandmother. Elvira, oddly, sleeps in her own coffin – which turns out to be a life-saving habit later in the book – and is one of the first to appreciate Eva’s talent for telling stories. Eva certainly doesn’t have a good temperament for a servant: She snatches off the patrona’s wig during an argument, and then runs away in shock, convinced she’s going to be arrested for scalping her! It is while she is wandering the city in confusion that she meets Huberto Naranjo, a street urchin and future revolutionary. He helps her get home, but when at the age of 15 she has another dispute with an employer – this time emptying a chamber pot over the head of a cabinet minister – she tracks him down again. He insists that a girl her age can’t live on the streets and finds her a place to live with a madam called La Señora – though he insists that she is to treat Eva like his sister, NOT a recruit. Ironically, that is the start of what might be the happiest and most innocent stage in Eva’s saga.
1. Nazis are never explicitly mentioned, and the young emigrant we follow certainly isn’t one. But his abusive father was in the Wehrmacht and the Soviet troops that occupied their village after the war insisted on showing everyone the concentration camp that had been on their doorstep and making them all, including young Rolf, help bury the dead. It makes a lasting impression.
2. He had a secret formula for preserving cadavers, was trying to cure cancer with malaria and “idiocy” by carefully thumping patients’ heads, and was “a dedicated anti-Socialist”.
Melesio, later known as Mimí, is La Señora’s best friend and probably my favorite character. When we meet her she is still known as a he (despite her insistence on having been born in the wrong body) and is working as an Italian teacher by day and a drag performer by night. Melesio hangs out with La Señora and Eva every day, and Eva adores him/her. Then, after the residents of the red light district draft a letter complaining about an overbearing vice cop, the club gets raided and Melesio is arrested while still in costume. Since I couldn’t quite remember how this story goes, I was extremely worried - rightly so, as it turns out. This is not a book that spends a lot of page-length on violence, but it does not sugar-coat it either. But while La Señora might be a highly morally grey character, she doesn’t abandon her bestie, who upon release begins in earnest her transformation into Mimí. She reunites several years later with Eva, who had in the meantime been living in a small town with Lebanese shopkeeper Riad Halabí and his wife, who Eva got arrested for murdering after she shot herself. Eva is a little puzzled at how hard Mimí works for this “reincarnation” because “I had told myself so often it is a curse to be born a woman…I could not see a single advantage”, but she is very supportive (by “cis person in the ‘60s” standards, at least). They live together, find new careers together, and even lend their respective knowledge to Huberto’s plan to spring some of his comrades out of the prison where Mimí was once held.
The relationships between Eva and her pseudo-parental figures, including Elvira, Mimí, and Riad, are – besides the evocative language - the best part of the book. The romances, on the other hand, were a bit disappointing. In some cases they are clearly meant to be unsatisfying, but some were just not to my taste. For instance (*spoiler, but also potential trigger warning*) I wish Eva and Riad’s relationship had stayed 100% platonic. Even though I wanted Riad to find someone who doesn't care about his hare-lip, I didn't want it to be 17-year-old Eva who kisses him! The semi-incestuous polycule3 Rolf gets involved in for a time wasn't bad but it was neither my thing nor particularly plot-relevant. The final relationships Eva and Mimí end up in seem fine – it is fitting that Eva falls for someone else who is, in his own way, a storyteller – but we don’t actually see enough of either couple’s interactions to get a sense for the chemistry. For that, I much prefer ‘Daughter of Fortune’: while we don’t get to see Eliza and Tao’s romance fully confirmed (until the sequel), the slow unfolding of the friendship that leads into it is great.
3. Given that Rolf could have legally married either of his cousins - and indeed his uncle at one point hopes that he would - the familial relationship wouldn't be the problem with this setup as far as any of the characters in the book are concerned.
I can’t quite make up my mind if I like the treatment of the Indian characters in this story. On the one hand, the depictions can feel a little “noble savage” at times. On the other hand, the description of a tribal chief’s decision to aid the prison break plan rings true based on what I’ve heard about White-Indian interactions in Latin America (eg. Che Guevara’s attempts to promote revolution in Bolivia, where the peasantry was/is mostly indigenous):
“The Indians were not interested in his revolution, or anything else that came from that hated race…They did not share the guerrillas’ ideals; they did not believe their promises or understand their reasoning…if they had agreed to help…it was because the military were their enemies…The chief knew that even if the Indians had not been involved, the soldiers would hold them responsible.”
Similarly, Mimí makes the point that Huberto is too steeped in machismo for a revolution led by the likes of him to be what she or Eva needs:
“Look, Eva, men like Naranjo can’t ever change. They may modify the rules, but they always operate on the same principle: authority, competitiveness, greed, repression – it’s always the same.” [Eva] “But if he can’t change things, who can?” [Mimí]“You and I, for example.”
I’m not sure I fully agree – I tend to think a real change requires both changes in political/economic structures and in attitudes – but certainly revolutions of “the people” that haven’t included ALL the people have always failed to fully live up to their promise.
Overall recommendation: This is a historical fiction with light magical-realism elements that doesn’t shy away from the hard or even horrifying parts of its mostly marginalized and working-class characters’ lives, but at the same time has a lyrical beauty and wry humor. While I probably wouldn’t recommend it as someone’s first Allende novel – especially if romance is an important component of a story for you – it is still worth a read.
