Featured image:  Allende says Eva Luna was inspired by her time in Venezuela / Photo by wirestock via Envato

The imagery, stories and history of South America

by Carolyn Ray, Editor, JourneyWoman

An article in Oprah Magazine shares Allende’s inspiration for her books: “Reflecting on her historic career, Allende identified the trait that all of her characters share: They’re prone to making interesting decisions—not necessarily good ones. “I’m not interested in people who have easy lives. They don’t make good characters of books,” Allende says.

The JourneyWoman Book Club travels the world, one read at a time. We choose books with themes of travel and migration, or with a strong sense of geographical place, and – while we don’t exclude works by male authors – we particularly seek out stories written by women.

In our book club selections, we aim for diversity in what we read and in who we read. It is important that we include both books crafted by travellers exploring other lands, and those written by authors born all around the world. We’ve read almost three dozen books together so far, and we’re examining our lists to find the gaps.

Book Club Discussion Questions

We may not get through all of these, but here are some thoughts to start our discussion!

1. The book is set in an unnamed South American country.  Why do you think the author chose to fictionalise or disguise the location?
2. Have you travelled in South America? Did anything about the book’s setting feel familiar? Why, or why not? 
3. What was your favorite passage in the book and why?
4. The story begins with an epigraph from A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights.  Is there any similarity between Scheherazade – the bride of the Arabian Nights who tells stories as a survival strategy – and the child Eva?
5. Eva has a series of mother figures in her life, including Consuelo, her madrina, Elvira and La Señora. How do these women nurture her, or fail her?
6. What did you make of the scene where the Soviet soldiers took Rolf and the other villagers to bury the bodies? Why do you think they did that?
7. The book has a touch of magical realism, a fictional genre which combines realistic settings, characters and plot with elements of fantasy. Can you name an instance where a magical moment found its way into the story? How did this affect your reading of the book?
8. Eva says “Writing was the best thing that had happened to me in all my life” (page 136). Do you have a skill or a pastime that has added meaning to your life?
9. The author was the cousin (once removed) of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who was assassinated in 1973, when Allende was in her thirties. Do you think this political background is reflected in Eva Luna?
10. The characters in the novel are complex, with both ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ displaying a mix of positive and negative characteristics. In which character did you notice this most strongly, and why?
11. How did mountain life change Huberto? And how did he stay the same?
12.  Why do you think Eva chose the man she did, in the end?
13. Many of the book’s characters are immigrants, but they adapt to their new country in very diverse ways. What differences are there in how Rolf Carle and his uncle Rupert embrace their new country? How about Riad Halabí?
14. “I had told myself so often it is a curse to be born a woman that I had some difficulty understanding Melesio’s struggle to become one” (page 188). Allende wrote this novel in the 1980s. Are her observations on gender relations still relevant today?
15. When Eva turns her memories into stories (pages 224 and 263), the characters seem melodramatic even for the soap opera scripts she’s writing. In the context of the broader narrative, did her life story ring true, or seem implausible?

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