SOURCE: A review of The Stories of Eva Luna, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 252, No. 9, March 11, 1991, pp. 314-16.

An American critic and educator, Hart is the author of Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende (1989). Below, she discusses Allende's narrative structures, characters, and use of magic realism in The Stories of Eva Luna.

Critics of Isabel Allende's first book, The House of the Spirits, seized on her blending of magic, hyperbole and realism to insist that it was a shallow ripoff of Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, without perceiving her vast fundamental differences from the Nobel laureate or that most of the superficial similarities to One Hundred Years of Solitude were ironic, even parodic. Such an evaluation reveals ignorance of the broad tradition of magic realism in Latin American fiction by assuming that García Márquez invented and patented the family saga or the...