Poetic truth and Isabel Allende

http://http://www.isabelallende.com/curious_speeches_frame.htm

The great truths are always totally fresh and perennially reborn although there is nothing new under the sun. All life events can be transformed with the use of the poetic imagination which is necessarily poetic. The tired soul can be reinvigorated. It is truly as stated below beyond the appearance of things. Isabel was truly a prolific writer employing magical realism, truth beyond the literal events themselves.To experience the mystical or the desire for mystical experience is really an obsession of a tired soul not for the novel, but for the perennial beneath the facade of the spurious and the shallow to capture the fleeting essence of the sublime. We have to be wedged out the comfort zone of our drab "existence" with the stimulus of suffering and shattering events such as war, revolution, holocausts. That may be their value ,their wedging effect. To feel a constant presence, as Allende alludes to she would have to be nurtured to that point of sensitivity.

Isn't this the playful substance of literature?... An event transformed by
poetic truth. Writers are like those good thieves, they take something that is
real, like the letters, and by a trick of magic they transform it into something
totally fresh. That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures,
giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination,
creating some kind of truth with many lies

Good fiction is not only the thrill of a plot, at its best it is an invitation to explore beyond the appearance of things, it challenges the reader's safety, it questions reality. Yes, it can be disturbing. But there may be a reward at the end. With some luck, the author and the reader, hand in hand, may stumble upon some particles of truth. Usually, however, that is not the intention of the author in the first place. The writer merely suffers from an uncontrollable need to tell the story. There is nothing more to it, believe me.

The home of my grand-parents, where I spent my childhood, was inhabited by wild pets, strange humans and benevolent ghosts.
My grandmother was a charming lady who had little interest in the material world. She spent most of her time experimenting with telepathy and talking to the souls of the dead during her séances. This clairvoyant lady who could move objects without touching them, served as model for Clara del Valle in my first novel, THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. She died long ago, at a young age, but like my daughter Paula, she is a constant presence in my life. My grand-father was a solid Basque, stubborn and strong as a mule, who gave me the gift of discipline. He could remember hundreds of folk tales and long epic poems; he spoke in proverbs. He lived to be a century old and during the last part of his life he read many times the Bible from cover to cover and the Encyclopedia Britannic from A to Z. He gave me the love of language and stories.