Word: eva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ALLENDE'S novel focuses on the story of Eva Luna, whose name, she says, means "I am life". A natural narrator, she tells us that she was conceived as part of a cure for a native Indian who was poisoned by a snake bite. As her parents are dead, her story centers on her life in the capital city, presumably Caracas, where she works as a domestic servant. Her only companions are her adopted grandmother, Elvira, who sleeps in a coffin every night to avoid spending extra money on a bed, and her godmother, whose head, Eva says, is addled...
...first half of the novel, in fact, centers on Eva's moving from job to job in an upwardly mobile search for a normal employer who will treat her humanely. Initially a slave to the minister of the interior, who requires her to shave him every morning while he sits on his velvet-covered toilet, Eva moves to the home of a Yugoslavian potter. She teaches her the secret of creating images out of Universal Matter--a conglomeration of bread dough, dental cement and magic...
...idyll does not last. Unfairly accused of killing one of her employers, Eva runs away and joins the Venezuelan underworld, a change that affects the direction of her life and the theme of the novel...
...When Eva makes contact with members of the underworld in the capital city she becomes a committed leftist, and the novel takes on, for the first time, a decidedly political tenor...
...Eva also becomes friendly with Huberto Naranjo, a street urchin turned guerrilla fighter who commands vast troops of men dedicated to the overthrow of the government...