THE SUM OF OUR DAYS.
Isabel Allende. Harper Collins. 301 pages. $26.95.
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At a cocktail party, a guest asked Isabel Allende, ''What do you do?'' The author, Chilean by birth but well settled in northern California, responded: ``I am a novelist.''
Her reply is only part of the story. Paula is a heartbreaking memoir about the death of her daughter; My Invented Country was a fascinating take on how expats view the home they left behind. And still, Allende the novelist flows through her nonfiction. A fluid narrative, laced with dreams and fantasies, carries through her engaging new memoir, as Allende describes how simple events -- a trip to a bookstore, perhaps -- lead to a welcome expansion of characters in her life.
Present are members of her extended family -- ''the tribe'' -- she has written about often: her husband Willie, with whom she fell passionately in love on a book tour; her daughter Paula, who died after a long illness, and to whom she constantly addresses her thoughts; her son Nico, whose wife, Celia, left him for Sally, the girlfriend of Willie's son, Jason, and generations from Chile to California, where the tribe includes lesbian couples, Buddhist nuns, an imported Chinese bride and a surrogate mother.
Each person carries a burden, which Allende tries to lessen. Meddle she does, the trait of an insatiably curious woman, no matter how often Willie reminds her to butt out. She remembers small details that happened in her life, between her already considerable list of books, details nurtured by a prolific pen and a vivid imagination.
As always, there are the spirits present, a strong theme of her first novel The House of the Spirits, and the title she's given to her new home in San Francisco. ``My grandmother used to say that space is filled with presences, of what has been, is, and will be. My characters live in that transparent atmosphere, but I can hear them only if I am silent. . . . When I am no longer me -- the woman -- but another -- the narrator -- I can see them as well. They emerge from the shadows and appear before me whole, with their voices, and their smell.''
Yet amid the interesting vignettes, the book charts a change in Allende's outlook; she grows more contemplative than fully immersed in the moment. The feminist softens her stance. The meddler learns to stand back. The devoted granddaughter is now a devoted grandmother. Now in her mid 60s, this perky and battling intellectual may be tiring or simply retiring, as she hints to Willie in an intimate conversation: ``What does imagination feed on, anyway?''
Whatever the results of this introspective memoir, The Sum of Our Days acts as an insightful compilation of Allende's life and thoughts in between those periods of agonizing discipline in which she forces herself to sit down and craft a new novel.
Marta Barber is a writer in Miami.
