SOURCE: "Night with Real Men," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4584, February 8, 1991, p. 12.

In the review below, Butt focuses on the romantic themes in The Stories of Eva Luna.

Readers of Isabel Allende's previous novel, Eva Luna, will recall that we left the left-wing waif in Cloud Cuckoo Land in the arms of the dashing international photo-journalist Rolf Carle: "He strode forward and kissed me exactly as it happens in romantic novels, exactly as I had been wanting him to for a century, and exactly as I had been describing moments before in my Bolero."

The purpose of the curious self-parody in the last part of the sentence was transparent. By casting Eva Luna as a writer of soap operas, the author could attribute to her such passages as the one just quoted. All of Isabel Allende's novels have tended to show romantic love conquering all, but Eva's...