Customer Reviews

Eva Luna

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Are you looking to add some vivid color into your life? Isabel Allende's literary and highly imaginative writing style will captivate and and delight you in this highly visual and sensual novel. I found this book to be much better and less formulaic than the HOUSE OF SPIRITS was. The character is fully fleshed out and seems more real; perhaps because the protagonist is a woman, Eva Luna herself, and in the other book, Allende offers the narrative through a domineering and somewhat obtuse man's eyes. The growth of Eva Luna is beautifually told and readers will identify with her throughout. This evocative novel set my imagination on fire and made all the colors in my world appear brighter while I was reading it.

Conceived on her father's deathbed and almost strangled to death by her umbilical cord, the baby who emerged would become the woman, Eva Luna. Her birth is incredible and her life is even more so as Eva spins for us her story and the story of those who impacted her life.

Isabel Allende captivates the reader by having us take a glimpse of the life and times of Eva Luna, a child whose life is so surreal and incredible to the point where fact and fantasy become one and the same. Eva's voice sweeps us into the dark world of perverts, undesirables and revolutionaries. Through Eva's stories you get a closer look at a society rotten at its core while masquerading as a democracy.

Come with Eva, as a little girl where she plays with a stuffed puma owned by a mad-man who uses Indians for his embalming experiments. Watch as this orphaned girl is "sold" off by her strange godmother who believes in the gods of her ancesteral Africa and the saints of Catholicism. Watch Eva as she grows from childhood to adolescense to an adult who has to confront the reality of love and revolution.

EVA LUNA is a lyric tale whose language draws you immediately into the life of the character and her supporting cast. You feel a deep empathy for this woman and you see through her eyes the contradictions that life has to offer. Allende has given us an exceptional work that explores both the spiritual, political and sensual side of a woman caught up in the stream of chaos in her South American country. Come, let Eva tell you a story, her story and you will find yourself unable to tear yourself away from her amazing tale.

Sometimes, actually pretty often, Isabel Allende's writing overflows with her own love of language, and you kinds want her to dial it down a little. Not so much, however, in Eva Luna. The writing is more controlled; the book reads as tho an editor actually paid some attention to it before sending it to press.
Child of a servant, the beautiful and enchanting Eva Luna escapes into lyrical storytelling when life gets too tough to bear. She and Rolf, a film maker, are brought together through Eva's guerrilla lover. The result is a lovely piece of literature that works as a metaphor for salvation through creativity.
It's a good one.

This amazing story of an orphan whose life seemed to have finished an expedition through the most enigmatic and most pleasurable world, is the novel that is to be never forgotten because of its amazing magic. Magic that will serve as your carpet ride through the most amazing story of a woman's life: Eva Luna's. Eva Luna, the sexy, naughty, adorable, beautiful woman is a shining proof of the existence of literature's wonders. Isabel Allende created a literary jewel.

I found the first half of the book put-downable, meaning that I didn't have a COMPULSION to read it. Nevertheless, I kept it with me and was enchanted whenever I was reading. [NB It evoked similar feelings when reading it to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love In The Time of Cholera, so if you liked that, you will surely like this]

However, as Eva moved out of her childhood, and the character range widened, the book became more and more un-put-downable, to the point where I was reading it walking down the street.

Allende is a beautiful story-teller. That you learn about the social and historical background of Chile - unstated, but unmistakeable) is a subtly conveyed bonus.

Thoroughly recommended!

For those of you who are stalwart devotees to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who believe Updike is a mere scribbler compared to the Latin literary lion, who believe "One Hundred Years of Solitude" should be worshiped more piously than the Bible and Koran put together, it may behoove you stop reading this review ahora mismo. OK, I'm going to admit "One Hundred Years" is the only novel I've read by Marquez, and "Eva Luna" is the only novel I've ready by Allende. But "One Hundred Years" is supposed to be Marquez' magnum opus and "Eva Luna" is not generally considered one of Allende's top works, so I think it's OK to compare. Having said this, I would rather read ten more novels by Allende than one more by Marquez.
As I began "Eva Luna," I was afraid that I had stumbled into a Marquez imitator who was going to be even more mind-numbing than the original. Instead, I found a writer who, I'm sorry, has taken the madcap, Latin-style adventure story thought by many to be perfected by Marquez and improved on it so much that I wondered if Allende has been inspired by Marquez at all. Now I understand that Marquez is an immensely talented artist and that it could very well be that I belong to a small minority of literary fiction readers who merely don't care for Marquez' particular style. Some may even want to point out that Marquez' style is just too high-brow and advanced for my philistine intellect, which may very well be accurate.
Nevertheless, it is clear to me that Allende's characters are obviously more well-rounded, more interesting, and more human than anything Marquez could ever conjure up. I appreciate the level of thought in his stream-of-consciousnesses, but they didn't necessarily add to the story. In fact, it muddied up a novel that already contained to many half-formed characters that seemed more like dashed-off profiles of historic figures than anyone I would be interested in learning more about. All of Allende's main characters - Eva, Rolf, Huberto, madrina, the gloriously sexed-up twin sisters who lived with Rolf - are all clearly labors of love from Allende. Her interwoven plot devices are also more disciplined than Marquez, which may be because Allende doesn't seem to take herself as seriously as Marquez. One gets the impression that Marquez was busily mopping his brow while hunched over his keyboard pounding out "One Hundred Years," thinking to himself how the magnificent piece of art he was creating was going make Joyce look light a lightweight and make even another Nobel Prize look unworthy. Allende, on the other hand, gives the impression she actually had fun writing her novel, perhaps smiling wryly at the fact she was creating such a fine piece of literary entertainment, happy and content that she has been given the gift to do what she does.
I can't say I'll never read Marquez again; in fact, I hope to give the man another shot one day soon. When someone gets called the "Greatest Living Novelist" as often as he does, it's possible I'm just missing the boat. But I'm much more anxious to get back to gorgeous, intelligent, and even somewhat philosophical stylings of Allende before too long. "Zorro" seems to be getting mixed reviews, but I don't care. This woman makes me want to become proficient enough in Spanish to read fiction in its original form.

This is one of my favorite books, and I recommend it to everyone. I love the main character, Eva Luna, a strong young woman with a no-nonsense approach to life and love. The stories are enticing and complex, so well written you'll feel you're actually living the scene. Read it and then buy the sequel, Tales of Eva Luna, which is also excellent.

I think this book illustrates the situation in revolutionairy Chile very well. But it also gives the reader a very fine view on the South-American life. I must say that a reader has to be interested in these two subjects. But that is a rule for any Allende book. If you read one and you enjoyed it, you might read them all (and there are a lot of books written by her). She writes in a very typical style. Very much her own style, but I think it has so many Southern influences, the siësta-style perhaps. The sentences are sometimes a bit difficult, but the story is so wonderfully built from the first brick to the last one. I would really advise anyone to read the book. It is a bit sad, but also a big victory on life. Absolutely great how abstract it is written, from one thing to the opposite...

In the tradition of great novelists, Allende creates a life for her female hero that's full of adventure and interesting characters, each having grand adventures of their own. As picaresques, they're both peculiar and lovable. And because they love the endearing Eva Luna, she survives her difficult orphan's life and lives happily ever after (like her fictional siblings Jones, Flanders and Twist). Magical Realism is Allende's specialty. So is telling a woman's tale. Like House of the Spirits, this one is very educational as to the politics that inspire rebellion, the romance of revolutionaries that makes for a great story, and the ways in which women get caught up in the fever. Speaking of getting caught up in the fever, so does the reader. In Eva Luna, we're introduced to many worlds and cultures, each more exciting than the next.

I have to remember that as much as I like the concept of "magical realism" I, for the most part, don't like the genre. I can think of two books I have actually enjoyed: Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade and The Yellow Sofa by Eca De Queiros. Most of the time the genre leaves me cold, confused and somewhat bored. There are often too many tangents and too much extraneous detail: Eva Luna has these problems.
I wanted to read Eva Luna after having enjoyed Daughter of Fortune back in 2003 and having had a moderate enjoyment of Zorro in 2005, although I had felt the author hadn't really understood the character. While there are some beautifully written passages in Eva Luna they didn't flow together to create a feeling of a coherent story or a plot that was actually going somewhere. Nor, though, did it feel like it was written strictly as a mood piece. Poor Eva seemed to be forced to tread water in the middle of all that flowing prose, bobbing her head up whenever the story required her to be present in a scene.

Eva Luna starts as a memoir of an illegitimate daughter of a maid and an indian. While Eva Luna continues to narrate the story of her life, she is but a passive witness to a disparate group of odd balls who end up becoming political revolutionaries. Their stories are so much more interesting than Luna's. Her constant rambling drags down the story and her role in all of this beyond reporter and maybe lover isn't clear.