Reading Notes Week 16: Allende, Part X

Isabelle Allende:

- 1942 to present
- Chilean novelist known from bringing magical realism to her experience as a woman
- Worked for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization before beginning a career in journalism
- Left Chile for Venezuela because she felt her family wouldn't allow her to continue her journalism career because she was expected to be a woman and take on motherly duties
- Allende wrote her first novel as a letter to her grandfather when he was dying

And of Clay Are We Created:

- Set in 1980's Chile
- Told from the perspective of one of Allende's recurring characters Eva Luna
- Her boyfriend is named Rolf Carle and is a reporter
- A young girl named Azucena was found trapped in a mudslide created after a volcanic eruption and an avalanche happened together. The news of this tragedy travels around the world quickly
- Rolf Carle flies there by helicopter and is the first to arrive on the scene because other reporters had trouble getting around the avalanche
- They try to use a rope to get her out but she is being held down by not just the pressure of the mudslide, but also by the corpses of her dead siblings who were clinging to her legs
- They bring her coffee and talk to her to try to cheer her up and keep her calm
- Rolf Carle is deeply horrified by the situation and he only feels worse as the situation gets worse
- The girl eventually dies, and Carle has to release the life buoy and let her sink
- Eva Luna says that Carle was never the same since he returned from that mission because of the trauma he went through getting attached to Azucena and being unable to save her

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