SOURCE: "Eva Luna: Writing as History," in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 29-42.

In the following essay, Diamond-Nigh examines Allende's treatment of Latin-American literary history in Eva Luna.

In the beginning was the Word. And in the end. The opening lines of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna (1989) place us squarely in a world created and structured by the written word: "My name is Eva, which means 'life,' according to a book of names my mother consulted." Indeed, the entire first chapter of that novel functions to displace our center of reference from the real world to the world of the Book where the life of the imagination is privileged. The epigraph to Allende's work comes from the paradigmatic Arabian Nights, in which Scheherezade's story-telling keeps her from a certain and undeserved death, setting up a primary theme of salvation through fabulation. Fabulation is here...