Tuesday, September 18, 2007

My name is Eva, which means "Life" according to the book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the black room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory. My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the place where the hundred rivers meet; he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions. She was marked forever by that landscape, and in some way she managed to pass that sign on to me.

So begins Isabel Allende's Eva Luna, as I take a break from marking in the dry air of the staff room. Through magical tales from authors like Allende, Marquez, and Coelho, I have developed a fascination for South America, a continent usually forgotten.

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