Writing as an act of hopeстатья из журнала
Аннотация: In every interview during the last few years I have encountered two questions that forced me to define myself as a writer and a human being: Why do I write? And whom do I write for? In 1981, in Caracas, I put a sheet of paper in my typewriter and wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits: “Barabbas came to us by sea.” At that moment I didn't know why I was doing it, or for whom. In fact, I assumed that no one would ever read it except my mother, who reads everything I write. I was not even conscious that I was writing a novel. I thought I was writing a letter‐a spiritual letter to my grandfather, a formidable old patriarch, whom I loved dearly. He had reached almost one hundred years of age and decided that he was too tired to go on living, so he sat in his armchair and refused to drink or eat, calling for Death, who was kind enough to take him very soon. I wanted to bid him farewell, but I couldn't go back to Chile, and I knew that calling him on the telephone was useless, so I began this letter. I wanted to tell him that he could go in peace because all his memories were with me. I had forgotten nothing. I had all his anecdotes, all the characters of the family, and to prove it I began writing the story of Rose, the fiancee my grandfather had, who is called Rose the Beautiful in the book. She really existed; she's not a copy from Garcia Marquez, as some people have said. For a year I wrote every night with no hesitation or plan. Words came out like a violent torrent. I had thousands of untold words stuck in my chest, threatening to choke me. The long silence of exile was turning me to stone; I needed to open a valve and let the river of secret words find a way out. At the end of that year there were five hundred pages on my table; it didn't look like a letter anymore. On the other hand, my grandfather had died long before, so the spiritual message had already reached him. So I thought, “Well, maybe in this way I can tell some other people about him, and about my country, and about my family and myself.” So I just organized it a little bit, tied the manuscript with a pink ribbon for luck, and took it to some publishers. In the process of writing the anecdotes of the past, and recalling the emotions and pains of my fate, and telling part of the history of my country, I found that life became more comprehensible and the world more tolerable. I felt that my roots had been recovered and that during that patient exercise of daily writing I had also recovered my own soul. I felt at that time that writing was unavoidable—that I couldn't keep away from it. Writing is such a pleasure; it is always a private orgy, creating and recreating the world according to my own laws, fulfilling in those pages all my dreams and exorcising some of my demons.
Год издания: 1993
Авторы: Isabel Allende
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Peace Review
Ключевые слова: Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics, Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 5
Выпуск: 2
Страницы: 165–175