Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Chilean writer whose debut novel 'The House of the Spirits' became an international bestseller; she lives in exile in California.
On the island
Eight records
Reminds me of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, the places where I lived when I was a child.
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67: II. Andante con moto
Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Otto Klemperer
I was brought up listening to classical music. This is a piece that I love and it has always been with me.
Habanera (L'amour est un oiseau rebelle) from Carmen
Maria Callas, Orchestre du Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Paris, conducted by Georges Prêtre
My third record has to do with sensuality, and I think in a way it reminds me of that time in Lebanon.
I chose Greens Leaves, this is New Age music, and I chose it because my daughter liked it very much.
Spring (Allegro) from The Four Seasons
Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by Claudio Abbado
I like this because it's very vivid and at the same time very sentimental. And it has to do with that part of me that is very sentimental.
I like this song very much because I my life is about memory, it's about remembering and about inventing memories.
Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus
I like the lyrics of this because in a way it's very true, although all my life I have tried to prove that it isn't that way. The winner doesn't take it all.
Ecce gratum from Carmina BuranaFavourite
Orchestra and Chorus of the Berlin Opera, conducted by Eugen Jochum
My last record is Carmina Burana because it's such a lively uh it's the joy of life, a celebration of life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:06You didn't so much dream that you would meet your present husband as write in a book how it would happen, didn't you?
When I wrote Evaluna I brought up this character Rolf Carlane to her life, and the circumstances and the character resembles a little bit my own husband. But that's a coincidence. I don't think I predicted that. It just happened.
Presenter asks
5:36There had been a lot of talk about a possible coup before it happened, but you've always said and written that you were really rather surprised by it. Why was that?
If I was a journalist, I suppose I should have known better. But I was not involved in politics, and I really believed that Chile had this long democratic tradition, that our armed forces were different, that we were not like those banana republics that we so much despised in Chile at the time. I thought it would never happen, and I also thought that if it did happen it would never have those that that brutality and that violence, or would last that long.
Presenter asks
14:24Why have you said that you were a feminist from the age of five?
Because I grew up in a household where the males had all the privileges and all the power, and my mother was a victim. My mother and I were the only females in the family. And I didn't want to be like my mother. I wanted to be like my grandfather, and protect my mother from this very harsh society that condemned her.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
21:15When you say you communicated with her through dreams, what do you mean?
I could feel her in dreams, I could talk to her in dreams, she would appear to me healthy or sick, but I had a relationship with her when I was asleep.
Presenter asks
27:28Has that now confused you about your own history? You've obviously invented memory, you've borrowed from what was real and you've invented more. Are you unsure now what is truth?
Totally unsure, especially with the House of the Spirits, because I wrote that book twelve years ago, and when I wrote the book my family wasn't very pleased. Some of my relatives wouldn't talk to me. And then, as the book became more popular and they started reading the reviews, then they started playing the roles. So the fiction of the book replaced the real story of the family the boundary was lost. And now we have the movie. So the fiction of the movie is so much greater than that of the book that I'm sure that when the movie is released we will have the photographs of Meriel Streep and Jeremy Irons on the piano and they will be my grandparents.
Presenter asks
32:00Do you long to go home to Chile one day, for good?
I go to Chile every year and every time I get there, I arrive in Chile, I'm fascinated and I feel that it's the great place. It's my country and I want to be there. But after a while I feel like suffocated. I realize that that it's very far away from everything, that it's very provincial. That I have become more a citizen of the world, that I needed a larger space. And then I leave, and I'm always missing it, so it's such an ambivalent feeling.
“I just sit down, turn on my computer, and let things happen at a very organic level. The story seems to unfold itself, the characters take over. And I am an instrument, a sort of medium.”
“Yes, I saw a lot of awful things. I saw a lot of killing and I saw people who were tortured. And part of my um my horror was that as soon as the curfew was lifted, half of my friends had disappeared. They were hiding, or they were in exile, or they were they had found asylum in an embassy, or they had died, or they were taken in prison.”
“The most painful time in my life, and also the most wonderful. When you have death watching over your shoulder. Life becomes so precious. … And there's a point when you are left with the very, very essential, the basic. And that's love. And after she died everything was gone. Except the love I gave.”
“The knowledge that I'm going to die. The knowledge that um there's nothing horrible about death. That it's a threshold, like being born. The only horrible thing about it is that we don't carry our memories with us, and that's why it's so terrifying.”
“Totally unsure, especially with the House of the Spirits, because I wrote that book twelve years ago, and when I wrote the book my family wasn't very pleased. … And then, as the book became more popular and they started reading the reviews, then they started playing the roles. So the fiction of the book replaced the real story of the family the boundary was lost.”