Random Summary Of Love and Shadows

Of Love and Shadows, or De Amor y de Sombra, was first published
in Spanish in 1984. It is Isabel Allende’s second novel, after the highly
successful The House of the Spirits. Of Love and Shadows traces the
developing love between the principal characters, Irene Beltrán and
Francisco Leal, amidst the backdrop of a military dictatorship in an
unnamed Latin American country resembling Chile. If we presume that
the novel is set in Chile, and the military dictator known as ‘the General’
is based on General Augusto Pinochet, then the novel is set in 1978, ‘five
years’ after the coup (p.137).



Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Peru (where her father was
stationed as a diplomat), but her homeland is Chile. Her mother divorced
Allende’s father and remarried another diplomat. As a result Allende
spent her early childhood living in Bolivia and Lebanon. When civil
strife broke out in Beirut in 1958 she was sent back to Chile to live in
her maternal grandfather’s household. As a young adult, Allende worked
as a journalist in Chile and for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organization. She and her first husband, Miguel Frías, were forced to
flee to Venezuela after the military coup in Chile in 1973 (see below).
Allende now lives in California after marrying her second husband,
Willie Gordon, an American.

Allende’s own life carries the themes of her writing, such as politics,
violence, memory and exile. Her own father walked out of their home
one day never to return, much as Eusebio Beltrán disappears saying he
is going to buy cigarettes (p.47). Of memory she has said, ‘When you
lose everything, everything that is dear to you … memory becomes more
important’. Like Irene at the end of Of Love and Shadows, Allende took
a bag of earth from her Chilean garden with her to Venezuela and then
planted forget-me-nots in it (Gordon 1987, p.534). Thus, her work is
often about the remembrance of people and their relationship to places
lost to them.

© Insight Publications 2010

To date Isabel Allende has written 14 books, reflecting the landscapes
of her own life’s journey, including Eva Luna (1985), set in Venezuela; and
Daughter of Fortune (1999), set in San Francisco. One of her best-known
works is Paula (1994), a memoir of her daughter who died tragically from
porphyria. Allende’s latest work is Zorro (2005).