Isabel Allende's Influence on Post-Boom Latin American Literature

Isabel Allende's Literary Style

On the literary plane, Isabel Allende's writing recreates a place and an era, allowing characters and story to emerge organically, without an initial plot plan. Several of her books have been born from letters and personal reflections; The House of the Spirits and Paula are prime examples of this. She composed Paula as a tribute to her daughter, indicating it is more a memoir than a biography. Humor is an integral part of her writings, whether journalistic or literary works. Allende attempted to reach young readers with The City of Beasts (2002), a book that allowed her a break and the freedom to capture their imagination in a new way.

The Post-Boom: New Latin American Narrative

Isabel Allende's work has been pigeonholed within the literary movement known as the Post-Boom. This movement is characterized by a return to realism, often close to oral narrative, and prose that is easier to read. The Post-Boom diminished the concern for experimenting with new writing styles, a hallmark of the sixties and seventies.

The Post-Boom follows the Boom, emphasizing popular themes, orality, and serialized forms in a forced pendulum movement, aiming to counteract the exaggerated formal experimentation of the preceding era. If the narrative of the Boom is interpreted as a product of the early optimistic expectations of revolutionary writing, the Post-Boom is closely linked to the era of disillusionment with the project of democratization.

Novels like Isabel Allende's Of Love and Shadows (1984) help address the experience of dictatorship, violence, and exile. Perhaps 1977 serves as a key year to take as a starting point for considering the transformation of narrative forms. Thereafter, among Boom writers, a gradual abandonment of structurally complex, watertight, and metaliterary forms can be observed in favor of novels more accessible to the reader, organized around a legible plot.

Characteristics of Hispanic American Narrative from 1975:

• Recovery of realism.
• Increased focus on historical novels.
• Rise of testimonial subject matter through testimonial novels.
• Themes of internal and external exile.
• Growing importance of authors focusing on urban and rural issues, exploration of the land, and social critique.
• Enrichment of different colloquial language registers.
• Boldness in exploring sexuality.
• An established female presence in writing.
• Newer fiction moves away from grand metadiscourses (like myth) and the obsessive pursuit of national American identity.