The Stories of Eva Luna

In The Stories of Eva Luna, characters grapple with difficult circumstances including political unrest, war, abuse, and illness. As the characters navigate these challenges, Allende asserts that language and storytelling are tools for survival. More broadly, Eva Luna’s role as narrator and the motif of Eva as a modern Scheherazade reinforce the concept of storytelling as a coping mechanism.

In several instances, protagonists in The Stories of Eva Luna use creative language or storytelling to survive. A prominent example of this is Belisa Crepusculario in “Two Words,” the opening story of the collection. Belisa “[makes] her living selling words” (3), pulling herself out of poverty and building a profession that allows her to support herself and be independent. Even Belisa’s name is something that she crafted for herself: “[S]he herself had searched until she found the poetry of ‘beauty’ and ‘twilight’ and cloaked herself in it” (3). Through Belisa’s near-magical use of language to find her identity and establish her independence, Allende asserts that stories can be used to shape reality. In Belisa’s case, language enables her to make a name for herself and to develop a relationship with the powerful Colonel. Allende links her tale to real-life instances of revolutionary language and storytelling by using Belisa’s last name as an allusion to Pablo Neruda. The Chilean poet was also a politician who worked with President Salvador Allende to build a socialist, more egalitarian Chile and was likely assassinated after Pinochet’s coup in 1973. His first book of poetry was called Crepusculario, indicating that Belisa is also a changemaker who can use her words to create a better world.

Other stories in the collection are cautionary tales, where Allende explores what may happen if the use of language goes astray. Maurizia, the protagonist in “Tosca,” tells a story through her life choices, chasing an opera-worthy romance by having an affair and leaving her husband and son to start a new life. Maurizia imagines herself in grand stories, attributing romantic features to herself and her lover. For many years, this strategy of living in a story works for Maurizia; she finds happiness amid harsh conditions living in an oil camp and then builds a strong community of friends when she moves to Agua Santa. Yet, at the end of the story, Maurizia sees her estranged husband with her son and realizes “that the true hero of her dream was Ezio [...] She hesitated for an infinite moment on the borderline between reality and dream, then stepped back” (101). In the end, Maurizia’s lifelong storytelling leaves her alienated. It is not clear whether the narrator believes that Maurizia is continuing to live in a dream or if resisting contact with her ex-husband represents her reentry into reality. Either way, Maurizia’s experiences underscore the potency of storytelling; it can aid in survival or bring about destruction.

The collection of tales in The Stories of Eva Luna reinforces the concept of storytelling as a tool for survival because the narrator of most of the stories, Eva, uses them for that very purpose. Eva offers the stories to Rolf to help him process his trauma and move forward into a positive future. Stories are the mechanism that Eva uses to bring hope and optimism into her world and her relationship. She finishes her stories to Rolf with this thought: “I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand” (270). After these words, Allende includes a closing epigraph: “And at this moment in her story, Scheherazade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent” (270). These closing lines solidify the motif of Eva as Scheherazade, a character who saves her life (and the lives of others) by telling stories. As such, Allende uses the story collection to reinforce the concept of stories as life-saving.