Eva Luna (Spanish: Eva Luna) was published by Plaza & Janés in 1987 and is Allende’s most exuberant and life-affirming novel — a picaresque narrative following its protagonist from birth to adulthood through a series of adventures that take her across the South American continent. Eva Luna is the daughter of a servant and a gardener; orphaned young, she survives by her intelligence, her charm, and above all her gift for storytelling — she tells stories to survive, to seduce, to comfort, and ultimately to create her own reality.
The novel celebrates the power of narrative itself: Eva’s stories-within-stories create a labyrinthine structure in which fiction and reality interweave until the boundary between them dissolves. Characters from Eva’s stories appear in her “real” life; events she narrates come true; her ultimate transformation into a television scriptwriter (for a telenovela called Bolero) makes her storytelling public and powerful. Allende’s argument is that storytelling is not an escape from reality but a way of creating it — that the stories we tell shape the world as much as material forces do.
The setting — a fictional South American country that blends elements of Venezuela, Chile, and Colombia — allows Allende to paint on a large canvas: guerrilla warfare, military dictatorships, indigenous cultures, immigrant communities, and the spectacular landscapes of the continent all provide material for Eva’s story and Eva’s stories. The novel is lighter than The House of the Spirits — more comic, more optimistic, more frankly entertaining — but it shares the earlier novel’s commitment to female strength and survival.
Collecting Eva Luna
First Spanish edition (Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Spanish edition: $40–$100
- First English edition (Knopf, 1988): $15–$40
- Signed copies: $50–$150