Isabel Allende

In the autobiographical vein that several critics have pointed out in examination of Allende's works, the author herself is a character in this memoir/ cookbook/list of aphrodisiacs. She introduces herself at the beginning as a woman at the doorstep of her fifties, "the last hour of dusk," in which she reflects on her life and her past "relationship with food and eroticism." However, Allende's larger focus is the power of sensory experience: she states that her memories are closely "associated with the senses." The reason for writing Aphrodite, she explains, is a celebration of her own sensual pleasures reawakening after a three-year period of mourning the death of her only daughter. Allende writes that a dream of diving into a pool filled with her favorite dessert, rice pudding, signaled her return to the joy of living; the book about the connection between food and sex naturally...