Japanese Lover - Author Bio (from LitLovers.com)
• Birth—August 2, 1942
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Education—private schools in Bolivia and Lebanon
• Awards—Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1998; Sara Lee Foundation Award, 1998; WILLA
Literary Award, 2000
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California, USA
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition.
Author of more than 20 books—essay collections, memoirs, and novels, she is perhaps best known for her
novels The House of the Spirits (1982), Daughter of Fortune (1999), and Ines of My Soul (2006). She has
been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." All told her novels have been
translated from Spanish into over 30 languages and have sold more than 55 million copies.
Her novels are often based upon her personal experience and pay homage to the lives of women, while
weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to
teach literature. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted American citizenship in 2003,
having lived in California with her American husband since 1989.
Early background
Allende was born Isabel Allende Llona in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros and Tomas
Allende, who was at the time the Chilean ambassador to Peru. Her father was a first cousin of Salvador
Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973, making Salvador her first cousin once removed (not her uncle
as he is sometimes referred to).
In 1945, after her father had disappeared, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago,
Chile, where they lived until 1953. Allende's mother married diplomat Ramon Huidobro, and from 19531958 the family moved often, including to Bolivia and Beirut. In Bolivia, Allende attended a North American
private school; in Beirut, she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile in 1958, where
Allende was briefly home-schooled. In her youth, she read widely, particularly the works of William
Shakespeare.
From 1959 to 1965, while living in Chile, Allende finished her secondary studies. She married Miguel Frias in
1962; the couple's daughter Paula was born in 1963 and their son Nicholas in 1966. During that time
Allende worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Santiago, Chile, then in
Brussels, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe.
Returning to Chile in 1996, Allende translated romance novels (including those of Barbara Cartland) from
English to Spanish but was fired for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue in order to make the
heriones sound more intelligent. She also altered the Cinderella endings, letting the heroines find more
independence.
In 1967 Allende joined the editorial staff for Paula magazine and in 1969 the children's magazineMampato,
where she later became editor. She published two children's stories, Grandmother Panchita and Lauchas y
Lauchones, as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita.
She also worked in Chilean television from 1970-1974. As a journalist, she interviewed famed Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda. Neruda told Allende that she had too much imagination to be a journalist and that she should
become a novelist. He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form—which she did and
which became her first published book. In 1973, Allende's play El Embajador played in Santiago, a few
months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.
The military coup in September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power and changed everything for
Allende. Her mother and diplotmat stepfather narrowly escaped assassination, and she herself began
receiving death threats. In 1973 Allende fled to Venezuela.
Life after Chile
Allende remained in exile in Venezuela for 13 years, working as a columnist for El Nacional, a major
newspaper. On a 1988 visit to California, she met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon, with whom
she now lives in San Rafael, California. Her son Nicolas and his children live nearby.
In 1992 Allende's daughter Paula died at the age of 28, the result of an error in medication while
hospitalized for porphyria (a rarely fatal metabolic disease). To honor her daughter, Allenda started the
Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and
preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected."
In 1994, Allende was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit—the first woman to receive this honor.
She was granted U.S. citizenship in 2003 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in
2004. She was one of the eight flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin,
Italy.
In 2008 Allende received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from San Francisco State University for her
"distinguished contributions as a literary artist and humanitarian." In 2010 she received Chile's National
Literature Prize.
Writing
In 1981, during her exile, Allende received a phone call that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death.
She sat down to write him a letter wishing to "keep him alive, at least in spirit." Her letter evolved into The
House of the Spirits—the intent of which was to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although
rejected by numerous Latin American publishers, the novel was finally published in Spain, running more
than two dozen editions in Spanish and a score of translations. It was an immense success.
Allende has since become known for her vivid storytelling. As a writer, she holds to a methodical literary
routine, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. "I always start on 8 January,"Allende
once said, a tradition that began with the letter to her dying grandfather.
Her 1995 book Paula recalls Allende's own childhood in Santiago, Chile, and the following years she spent in
exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter. The memoir is as much a celebration of Allende's
turbulent life as it is the chronicle of Paula's death.
Her 2008 memoir The Sum of Our Days centers on her recent life with her immediate family—her son,
second husband, and grandchildren. The Island Beneath the Sea, set in New Orleans, was published in
2010. Maya's Notebook, a novel alternating between Berkeley, California, and Chiloe, an island in Chile, was
published in 2011 (2013 in the U.S.). Three movies have been based on her novels—Aphrodite, Eva Luna,
and Gift for a Sweetheart. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/23/2013.)
Books (from nationalpost.com)
Manners and death in the 20th C: Isabel
Allende’s The Japanese Lover, reviewed
Republish
Reprint
Philip Marchand | October 30, 2015 | Last Updated: Oct 30 8:00 AM ET
More from Philip Marchand
Book review: The Japanese Lover, by
Isabel Allende
The Japanese Lover
Isabel Allende
Simon and Schuster
336 pp; $32
Isabel Allende’s novel, The Japanese Lover, peaks in the first chapter, “Lark House.” Lark House is a
“senior residence” in San Francisco, a “community” partly subsidized by the estate of a defunct
chocolate magnate. “Founded in the mid-twentieth century to offer shelter with dignity to elderly
persons of slender means, for some unknown reason from the beginning it had attracted left-wing
intellectuals, oddballs, and second-rate artists,” Allende writes. “Lark House had undergone many
changes over the years but still charged fees in line with each resident’s income, the idea being to create
a certain economic and racial diversity. In practice all the residents were white and middle class, and the
only diversity was between freethinkers, spiritual searchers, social and ecological activists, nihilists, and
some of the few hippies still alive in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
This is a sufficiently striking introduction to life in this community, but there’s more: A certain Catherine
Hope, a wheelchair-bound member of the residence, who is also a physician, gives some advice to a 23year-old named Irina about to take a job at Lark House. A native Moldavian, Irina has worked in a lot of
jobs since coming to America, including dog washer, and is confident she can handle this one, but is
always ready to listen. “The elderly are the most entertaining people in the world,” Doctor Hope says.
“They have lived a lot, say whatever they like, and couldn’t care less about other people’s opinion…This
community stimulates them and they can avoid the worst scourge of old age: loneliness.”
The head of the cleaning staff, one Lupita, also shares her experience. “Watch out for depression, Irina,”
she says. “That’s very common here.” Irina asks what she is to do with depressives. “It depends. I stroke
them, and they always like that, because old people don’t have anyone who touches them, and I get
them hooked on a TV series, because nobody wants to die before the final episode.”
Finally the director of the residence imparts a last bit of necessary information. The building is haunted
by two ghosts, the director says, one of whom is the chocolate magnate’s daughter, who died of grief
after her son drowned in a swimming pool. The other is the drowned boy. Irina brushes this off — she
does not believe in ghosts — but she soon changes her mind. “She was to discover,” Allende writes,
“that many of the old folk were permanently accompanied by their dead.”
The presence of ghosts in this novel fulfils the book’s quota of magic realism, always a necessary
element in an Isabel Allende novel. I do not think it is too much of a spoiler to mention that their
presence in this narrative is minimal. A ghost does play a key role in the novel’s conclusion, but
otherwise there is no fuss over wandering ectoplasm.
Lark House and its inhabitants duly introduced to the reader, the narrative could very well unfold as an
amusing novel of manners, a social comedy featuring peppery outspoken characters with one foot in the
grave. It is a formula that has been employed with some success in movies and television.
But then a new character arrives almost immediately after Irina — a wealthy widow and an artist
celebrated for her “original, brightly coloured kimonos, tunics, kerchiefs, and scarves.” A crusty soul
named Alma Belasco, she nevertheless likes what she sees in Irina and hires her as her private secretary.
From that time on, the novel becomes the story not of Lark House and its residents but the story of
Alma Belasco.
Alma enters the scene in 1939 as the daughter of an affluent Jewish family, the Mendels of Danzig,
Poland. In San Francisco his brother-in-law Isaac Belasco urges Mendel to leave Poland immediately.
“Mendel responded that Poland’s sovereignty was guaranteed by England and France,” Allende writes.
“He thought he was safe, protected by his money and his business connections, so the only concession
he made to the relentless assault of Nazi propaganda was to send his children abroad to weather the
storm.” His son Samuel was sent to Britain; Alma to the Belascos of San Francisco.
Fortunately, Lillian and Isaac Belasco are modest and loveable. Isaac Belasco is one of the most brilliant
lawyers in San Francisco, but is as kindly and well-intentioned as Mendel is stiff-necked. Of course,
Mendel loves his daughter but the only legacy he can give her is the advice of an embittered man: never
complain, never ask for anything, strive to be the best in everything you do, and never trust anybody.
It will take a lifetime to modify that legacy. As it is, Alma grows up to become one of those people who
prefer cats to people and despise the human race. (An acceptable attitude as long as you, the despiser
of the human race, don’t make an exception for yourself.)
Meanwhile, at home in the San Francisco mansion of the Belascos, Alma slowly accepts Isaac and Lillian
and befriends their son Nathaniel, and Ichimei, the son of the Belasco’s Japanese gardener. In this way,
Alma eventually becomes the axis of a network of friends, many of them dealing first hand with the
catastrophes of the twentieth century. The Japanese Lover becomes an epic novel with lines extending
from Alma to the internment camps of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to Nazi-occupied
Europe, to certain Reagan-era horrors, to sexual slavery spawned by the ruins of the former Soviet
republic of Moldavia.
The protagonists of this network are good people, which is a relief — there has to be some balance of
good and evil in an epic. On the evil side you have Nazis, bigoted Californians, sexual abusers of children.
What good could possibly counter-balance that? You have to come up with somebody like Ichimei,
described by Alma as a “wonderful man, a sage, a saint, a pure soul, a delicate considerate lover.”
That’s almost sufficient right there to wipe out the influence on the cosmos of Heinrich Himmler.
At the same time, none of the characters have much vibrancy as individuals. The straightened residents
of Lark House — “an extra meal could ruin their meager budgets” — arouse more pity than victims of
war and persecution.
Weekend Post
Isabel Allende | LibraryReads Author,
November 15, 2015
By Barbara Hoffert on November 13, 2015
Photo ©2015
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende’s ­oeuvre ranges widely, from historicals set in 1800s Chile to chronicles of richly
multiethnic contemporary California, from YA adventures to novels with a thriller’s edge. But The
Japanese Lover, her lushly detailed new work, may be her most expansive yet, embracing the Holocaust,
the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, homosexuality in less liberal times, and
immigration today.
“I don’t know where it fits in my oeuvre, as my books are all so different, but I know why I wrote this
book,” explains ­Allende in a phone interview with LJ. “I turned 70, a time when you face old age, and as
I was planning this book in my mind and my heart, everything in my last books returned: memory, love,
people who die or leave.” In addition, Allende’s marriage of 27 years was ending, and she wanted to
explore the ideas of both loss and future opportunity. “Is it possible to have enduring love? Can a
relationship last a lifetime?” she muses.
Fans of Allende know her answers, as her books repeatedlyconfirm the power of love, something The
Japanese Lover reveals in all its shimmering multiplicity. Alma, sent from Poland as a child in ominous
1939 to live with San Francisco–based relatives, the Belascos, finds a far more loving adoptive family and
a cousin who teaches her the meaning of friendship, including in marriage. At the same time, she meets
Ichimei, son of the Belascos’ gardener, and though social stricture keeps the passion they conceive
private, it lasts through old age to death—and perhaps beyond.
Self-exiled after the 1973 overthrow of close relative Salvador Allende, the -Chilean-born Allende might
have become embittered, but instead she proclaims that she believes in love precisely because of her
life experiences. “In my life, I’ve had all kinds of love, starting with the love given by my mother,” she
explains. “And the love I can give to others is important, too.”
As her new novel reveals, love can be both transformative and redeeming. Meeting Ichimei in a
rundown motel, stiff society lady Alma is suddenly “an extravagant, noisy teenager,” says Allende. And
her grandson Seth’s love of Irina, who attends Alma at her old-age home, Lark House, promises to help
Irina recover from -terrible childhood abuse.
Like Alma and Ichimei, Moldavian-born Irina is a displaced person, something Allende can write about
easily and intimately. “I have been a displaced person all my life,” she clarifies. “I had diplomatic
parents, I lost my home, and now I am an immigrant, feeling I don’t quite belong.” Personal experience
also underlies her honest portrait of aging and, particularly, Lark House, based on a residence where a
friend now lives after a terrible accident—just like Dr. Catherine Hope in the novel. “She opened doors
for me,” explains Allende, who found the residents vibrantly active, both spiritually and intellectually.
“Every Friday they’re out there in wheelchairs, protesting the government and saving the whales.”
Though all of her novels deftly blend a welter of themes, Allende never starts with a plan. With The
Japanese Lover, she began by “visualizing a dance between an older couple and a younger couple,” and
the novel grew organically as themes important to her kept bubbling up.
In fact, she says, writing—“a time of silence to search the past and make connections”—has made her
who she is, and she’s discovered important things about herself through her works. “I have a very open
heart, and I’m impulsive and optimistic,” she confides. “Also, I’m very proud, and in that sense I
resemble Alma.” Yet, surely, pride is something that Allende richly deserves.—Barbara Hoffert
Created by a group of librarians, LibraryReads offers a monthly list of ten current titles
culled from nominations made by librarians nationwide as their favorites. See the November 2015 list
at ow.ly/TGLNC and contact libraryreads.org/for-library-staff/ to make your own nomination.
This article was published in Library Journal. Subscribe today and save up to 35% off the regular
subscription rate.
Japanese Lover- Discussion Questions
(from litlover.com)
1. As Alma Belasco reflects on her long life and the decisions she made to leave Ichimei and marry
Nathaniel, do you think she would have done anything differently if she had had the chance? Why or
why not?
2. At the beginning of her time at Lark House, Irina observes, “In itself age doesn’t make anyone better
or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been.” (p. 13) Do you think this is true of Alma
Belasco? Why or why not?
3. Alma and Samuel Mendel are just two of many people who were forced to flee Europe during World
War II—leaving their homes and loved ones behind. How does this affect the rest of their lives? How
does it impact their view of family?
4. Consider this passage as the Fukudas and other Japanese and Japanese-American families board the
buses to the internment camp at Topaz:
“The families gave themselves up because there was no alternative and because by so doing they
thought they were demonstrating their loyalty toward the United States and their repudiation of Japan’s
attack on Pearl Harbor. This was their contribution to the war effort.” (p. 88)
How does the experience at Topaz affect each of the Fukudas’ sense of patriotism and their experiences
as Americans? How does this change for each character over the course of internment?
5. Compare and contrast how the Belascos, a very formal family, uphold tradition, versus how the
Fukudas, a family of recent immigrants and nisei, respect tradition while embracing their new
Americanism.
6. Alma and Ichimei both experience the tragedy and loss of WWII firsthand. How does it affect each of
them as children? How does it contribute to their understanding of one another as adults later?
7. Ichimei Fukuda and Nathaniel Belasco are the two great loves of Alma’s life. How are they able to
coexist in her heart?
8. What role does race play in the choices Alma makes about her relationship with Ichimei? How would
their relationship have played out in a different time period? Compare this with the choices that
Megumi makes in her relationship with the soldier Boyd Anderson.
9. How do the choices of each mother throughout the novel change the lives of their children? Consider
Alma, Lillian, and Heideko.
10. In reconstructing her life story for Seth’s book, Alma had the opportunity to piece “together the
fragments of her biography, spicing them with touches of fantasy, allowing herself some exaggeration
and white lies” (p. 177). How does it affect Alma, nearing the end of her life, to be able to control the
narrative of her own life? Why do you think she chooses to leave out the stories about Ichimei at first?
Why does she eventually decide to tell Seth and Irina the full story?
11. Consider this statement which Ichimei writes in a letter to Alma: “Love and friendship do not age.”
(p. 176) Is Ichimei right about this? Why or why not? Consider the way that their relationship changes
throughout the novel.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)