The heroine of Isabel Allende’s My Name is Emilia del Valle is the illegitimate daughter of a Chilean aristocrat and an Irish novice nun. Born in 19th-century San Francisco, Emilia is an author of thrilling “dime novels” and a journalist, which takes her across the United States before catapulting her into Chile’s 1891 civil war.
This is Allende’s most lighthearted book, a late-Victorian adventure with exotic locales, hair’s-breadth escapes, and genuine comedy. Imagine a more action-packed David Copperfield narrated by a Latina Josephine March.
Although Emilia observes that “docility and eagerness to please, celebrated qualities in a woman, were grave obstacles to moving up in the world”, the women – be they nun, bellydancer or canteen girl – are thorny and bright, skirting and subverting stereotypes.
Emilia’s mother Molly, a fanatic moral paragon “armed with her rolling pin”, shows an astonishing talent for dreaming up dime-novel plots. (“The gorier and bloodier the details, the happier she seemed.”) Emilia’s bejewelled great-aunt Paulina gives a speech at a deathbed so hilarious and poignant it would make Charles Dickens himself smile.
There are parallels between Emilia and her author, both writers who are born into important political families, grow up without their birth fathers, and survive a Chilean civil revolution. Emilia’s forays as a dime novelist could be a nod to critics who have called the author’s work shallow. What’s more, the personal tone of Emilia’s newspaper columns perhaps winks to a moment in Allende’s journalism career, when the poet Pablo Neruda told her, “You are the worst journalist in this country. You put yourself always in the middle of everything.”
The magical realism often associated with Allende’s work makes no appearance; instead the novel is grounded in actual events. Historical figures include San Francisco Examiner editor Samuel Chamberlain, Chilean journalist Rodolfo León, and Patrick Egan, Irish activist and US ambassador to Chile.
But even the slightest of characters in the novel’s densely populated pages is crafted tenderly and given dignity and depth. It echoes the heroine’s own authorial aspirations, focusing as she does during an early trip to New York, “on the workers who all had abandoned their families to keep the trains running ... the waiters who slept upright”.
Despite being stripped of Allende’s trademark spirits, Emilia del Valle, with its resolute compassion, still manages to enchant.
