Daughter of Fortune (51 page)

Daughter of Fortune
had to be a story about diversity because California, especially San Francisco, was founded by people of many races. The region was first inhabited by Native American tribes, then by Spanish colonizers. There were Russian settlers in the north. It was a part of Mexico until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, when Mexico ceded it after losing the war with the United States. For a short while California became independent and finally it joined the Union. During that time it had immigrants from many places, especially Hispanics and Chinese. Mexicans, Chinese, Peruvians, and Chileans were digging for gold a year before the arrival of white Americans, who had to travel by land and took longer to reach California. When thousands of American settlers arrived in the fall of 1849 they imposed racist and abusive laws on the rest of the population and took away the land, the gold, and the rights of the people of color. The official story of the Gold Rush is always told by the winners, that is, by white males. I wanted to tell the story from another angle.

How did you come to incorporate acupuncture into this novel?

Acupuncture is a very old healing science used in China for thousands of years and used only recently in the Western world. I could not have a Chinese doctor in the novel who didn't practice it. I have a very good friend, Dr. Miki Shima, who specializes in Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and herbs. He was the model for the character of Tao Chi'en and he helped with the research of Oriental medicine.

Your book Paula centered on the death of your daughter. In
Daughter of Fortune
there is a depiction of a woman's grief at the loss of a daughter she mistakenly believes to be dead. What is it like to write on a subject so close and so painful?

Writing is always healing for me. When my daughter died in 1992 writing kept me relatively sane. Grief was like walking alone in a long dark tunnel and my way of walking was writing every day. Writing a memoir allowed me to unravel the confusion and get over the anger that the unnecessary death of my daughter caused our family. Paula should not have died. She was neglected in a hospital in Madrid.

Like many of your novels
, Daughter of Fortune
brings history alive. Much of the story takes place in California during the Gold Rush. The lives of your characters are woven into vivid depictions of the events of the time. Do you read a lot of history? Why did you choose the Gold Rush?

In 1987, when I was living in Venezuela, I traveled to the United States on a book tour. In Northern California I met a man, Willie Gordon, who had read one of my books and attended my reading. We fell in love and I moved to California to be with him. A few months later we married and we have been together ever since. When I came to San Francisco I was surprised by the fact that this very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and diverse city was really very young. It had been founded in 1848 during the Gold Rush. I started reading about that period and realized that it was a perfect subject for a novel. It was a time of adventure, greed, and violence, but also of idealism and courage.

Eliza suffers for the risks she takes in pursuit of love and ultimately doesn't get the man she thought she wanted. What do you think she does get?

Eliza ran away from the safety of her home in Chile, traveled alone hidden in the hold of a ship where she almost died, and then crisscrossed California for years looking for the man she loved. She did not find him but instead found something more valuable: freedom. She had friends, a full life helping others, and at the end she also had the love of Tao Chi'en, who was a much better man than her first lover Joaquin Andieta.

The following books are also available in Spanish from Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and can be found at www.harpercollins.com
.

In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss: the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily correspondence she shared with her mother in Chile, Allende bares her soul in a book that is as exuberant and full of life as its author. She recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her that become a new kind of family.

Throughout, Allende shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory. Here, too, are the amazing stories behind Allende's books, the superstitions that guide her writing process, and her adventurous travels. Ultimately,
The Sum of Our Days
offers a unique tour of this gifted writer's inner world and the relationships that have become essential to her life and her work.

Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom,
The Sum of Our Days
is a portrait of a contemporary family, tied together by the love, fierce loyalty, and stubborn determination of a beloved, indomitable matriarch.

This magisterial work of historical fiction recounts the astonishing life of Inés Suarez, a daring Spanish conquistadora who toiled to build the nation of Chile—and whose vital role has too often been neglected by history.

It is the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and when Inés's shiftless husband disappears to the New World, she uses the opportunity to search for him as an excuse to flee her stifling homeland and seek adventure. After a treacherous journey to Peru, she learns of his death in battle. She meets and begins a passionate love affair with a man who seeks only honor and glory: Pedro Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro. Together, Inés and Valdivia will build the new city of Santiago and wage a ruthless war against the indigenous Chileans. The horrific struggle will change them forever, pulling them toward separate destinies.

Inés of My Soul
is a work of breathtaking scope, written with the narrative brilliance and passion readers have come to expect from Isabel Allende.

“Riveting. . . . It simply captivates. . . . A colorful and clear-eyed portrait of a woman and a country.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“A powerfully evocative narrative. . . .

Allende is at her best here.”

—
Newsweek

Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is a child of two worlds. His father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe, while receiving from his father lessons in cattle branding and the art of fencing. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage.

At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege.

Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures—duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues—Diego de la Vega, aka Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.

“Allende's discreetly subversive talent really shows. . . . You turn the pages, cheering on the masked man.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

As a young girl Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, Aurora grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribed the lives of women at that time, but tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed, epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.

“Rich with color and emotion and packed with intriguing characters.”

—San Francisco Chronicle