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Overview. First published in Spanish in 1987, Eva Luna is a novel written by celebrated Chilean writer Isabel Allende and later translated into English by Margaret Sayers Peden the following year. The story is set in an unnamed South American country believed to be an amalgamation of Chile and Venezuela.
Eva Luna is a novel by Isabel Allende about a girl named Eva who has a gift for storytelling. Eva is forced to work for a variety of employers by her cruel godmother. After a political...
The Eva Luna Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes.
- Isabel Allende
Oct 11, 2022 · Eva Luna, the protagonist of the novel Eva Luna, is not an exception to that rule. In this novel, Allende experiments with a protagonist whose abilities mimic her own: Eva Luna, like her creator, the Chilean author Allende, is a storyteller. Fiction becomes both her reality and her livelihood.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
Eva Luna, the third novel by the Chilean author Isabel Allende, was first published in Spanish in 1985. An English translation was published in the United Statesin 1988. The story is narrated by the title character, who first tells the tale of Consuelo, her mother, and then proceeds through the rest of her own adventurous and sometimes bizarre life...
Isabel Allendewas born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru. Her father and mother were Chilean; her father, Tomás Allende, was a diplomat and first cousin of Salvador Allende, the president of Chile from 1970 to 1973. When Isabel was two years old, her parents divorced. Isabel's mother, Francisca, took her to live with her grandparents in Chile. After...
Chapter 1
The novel opens with Eva Luna introducing herself and then narrating the story of her mother's childhood. Missionaries in a jungle region take in an abandoned baby and name her Consuelo. They raise her until she is twelve and then send her to a convent. After she spends three years there, the Mother Superior finds Consuelo a job as the servant of a professor who has invented a new method for preserving dead bodies. Though eccentric and bad-tempered, Professor Jones is not unkind or abusive, a...
Chapter 2
In this chapter, Eva narrates the childhood of Rolf Carlé, an Austrian boy whose family is headed by a tyrannical, abusive father. Rolf is just a baby when his father joins the army to fight in World War II, allowing him to grow up without the abuse his older siblings had to endure. When Rolf is ten years old, Russian soldiers order all the residents of his village to come to a nearby prison camp to help bury the dead. A week later, Rolf's father returns from the war and resumes his job as a...
Chapter 3
In chapter 3, Eva tells the story of her mother's death. Consuelo unknowingly swallows a chicken bone at Christmas dinner and later begins bleeding internally. Three days later, realizing that she is dying, she calls in Eva's godmother and tells her to care for Eva; then, with Eva by her bedside, she passes away.
While no audiobook version of Eva Luna was available as of 2008, the story collection The Stories of Eva Lunais available at http://www.audible.com as a purchasable audio download.
Señor Aravena
Aravena is a famous and highly respected newsman who guides Rolf Carlé into his career as a reporter and filmmaker. He is honest, shrewd, and hedonistic, with a big appetite for the pleasures of life. Aravena's reputation as a newsman is so well known that even the corrupt government hesitates to censor his stories too heavily. His years of reporting have honed his instincts in political matters, and his predictions are usually accurate regarding government decisions and the public's reactions.
Aunt Burgel
Burgel is the first woman in Rolf's life to show him unabashed, unrestrained affection; his own mother was shy and feared the reaction of Rolf's father, who felt that too much affection would make his son "soft." She is also a prolific cook, constantly churning out baked goods and her own secret stew. Through her love, humor, and cooking, she helps nurture Rolf back to health both physically and emotionally.
Cabinet Minister
The last in the long line of Eva's employers, the vulgar cabinet minister achieved his high position mainly by fawning over others in power. He spends many hours seated on a plush armchair with a hole in the seat, so that he may relieve himself into a basin beneath; it is Eva's unenviable job to empty the basin.
The Transformative Power of Words
Eva uses her words and stories to paint her life experiences in more appealing hues. She helps Rolf do the same; in one scene, when Rolf tells Eva that his sister died "a sad death, alone in a hospital," Eva retells the story in a happier way, saying that Katharina died with a smile, repeating Rolf's name and feeling the warmth of their love for each other. Eva paints a vivacious and compassionate picture of her godmother, even though the woman abuses Eva and takes the wages she earns. While...
Perception versus Reality
Closely related to the theme of transforming experience with words is the idea that because we each perceive events from our own inherently biased viewpoint, there is no such thing as a fixed reality. As Eva puts it, "Maybe Zulema, Riad Halabí, and others had a different impression of things; maybe they did not see the same colors or hear the same sounds I did. If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation." Eva's vivid imagination and the long hours she spends writing contri...
Eva Lunais often described as a "picaresque" novel. What is the definition of picaresque? What other novels, stories, or movies do you think could be called picaresque? Make a list of ten titles th...Research the history of Venezuela. What similarities and differences can you find between the history of this country and the events in the novel? Write an essay about what you discover.In the novel, Eva enjoys taking stories from the radio or from books and changing the endings or rearranging events. Write a new beginning, middle, or end for Eva Luna, using the same characters bu...Allende mentions A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights more than once in the novel. How is Eva Lunasimilar to this tale? Does Eva Luna use her storytelling abilities in the same way, or di...First-Person Point of View
Eva Lunais written in the first person, from the point of view of Eva. This choice is important for several reasons. First, Eva's prowess as a storyteller and her love of writing are key elements of the novel. Simply by reading the way she tells her own story, the reader is given proof of her abilities. Second, Eva gives us several examples of the ways in which she alters reality to make it more palatable—for instance, when she retells the story of Katharina's death for Rolf to ease his grief...
Magical Realism
The term magical realism is used to describe a genre of literature in which magical, bizarre, and illogical events take place in an otherwise realistic setting. Allende uses this technique to give a fairy-tale quality to a story that also contains some very grim real-life issues. Wars rage; political leaders imprison, torture, and murder those who oppose them; ethnic groups are oppressed and persecuted; and yet within the same story, the vision of a palace appears from nowhere and then disapp...
Foreshadowing
Allende often hints at events to come or even overtly states what will happen later in the story. When Eva first meets Huberto Naranjo, she drops a hint of his future as a guerrilla: "At sixteen he would be the leader of a street gang, feared and respected … until other concerns took him off to the mountains." Similarly, after Eva first meets Melesio, she foreshadows his troubled future: "He never talked about his family and it would be years later, during his time in the penal colony on Sant...
Corruption in Venezuelan Government
Although Allende never specifies the country in which Eva Luna takes place, the political events Eva describes closely parallel the history of Venezuela. The government corruption that is rampant in the novel is also a part of Venezuelan history. Eva Lunawas first published in 1985 during the presidency of Jaime Lusinchi, whose administration was even more rife with corruption than those of many of his predecessors. It is estimated that as much as thirty-six billion dollars was stolen from th...
Women's Rights in Venezuela
The advancement of women's rights has come more slowly in South America than in the United States. As late as the 1970s, married or cohabiting women in Venezuela were not allowed to work, own property, or sign official documents without spousal consent. The advent of democracy in the 1960s was essentially a democracy for men only; women still had limited rights.
1960s: In the 1960s, there are no female heads of state in Latin America.1980s: Lidia Gueiler Tejada serves as the interim president of Bolivia from 1979 to 1980, becoming only the second female he...1960s: The Cuban Revolution of 1959 results in social reforms for health and education, giving hope to oppressed peoples in other Latin American countries and inspiring an upsurge in guerrilla acti...1960s: By 1960, Latin American countries export a significant percentage of the world's oil supply. An oversupply of oil on the market has led to lower and lower oil prices; in response to this sit...As Eva tells her story, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex South American nation—the rich, the poor, the simple, and the sophisticated—in a novel replete with character and incident, with drama and comedy and history, a novel that will delight and increase her devoted audience.
In this novel, she shares the story of her own life and introduces readers to a diverse and eccentric cast of characters including the Lebanese émigré who befriends her and takes her in; her unfortunate godmother, whose brain is addled by rum and who believes in all the Catholic saints and a few of her own invention; a street urchin who grows in...
