Allende's prose is really beautiful. It was so easy to sink into this, because the writing is so elegant, and it makes me want to pay closer attention to my own (knowing as I do that it will suffer by comparison).

That being said, I know I've shelved this under "writing" but it isn't really a book about writing... except it sort of is, and there was one passage that clinched it for me. "I have asked myself a thousand times what would have happened had I stayed [...] No one can answer that question, but of one thing I am sure: I would not be a writer had I not experienced that exile" (164). Allende is referring to when she fled Chile following Pinochet's military coup. That exile is the key point. The entire book is really a discussion of identity, and of exile, and the way that Allende used memories of Chile to cope with what is essentially bone-deep homesickness. And this pervading sense of nostalgia, over time, builds up to what she calls "an invented country," where the actuality of the country she left is altered by the perceptions of individual memory. That invented country came to the fore, of course, in books like The House of the Spirits, and so it's arguable (as indeed Allende herself seems to argue) that this fundamental sense of exile is the experience that underpins her entire development as a writer. It's just all very, very interesting... and there's still that gorgeous prose.