SOURCE: Levine, Linda Gould. “The Stories of Eva Luna.” In Isabel Allende, pp. 75-93. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2002.

In the following essay, Levine offers a stylistic and thematic analysis of The Stories of Eva Luna.

While each of Isabel Allende's books seems to emerge almost organically from the one that immediately precedes it, as well as from the particular conditions of the author's life, the relationship between Allende's 1987 novel, Eva Luna, and her 1990 Cuentos de Eva Luna (The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991) is singularly and understandably intense. Adding texture and breadth to Eva's role as storyteller, Allende completes in her short story collection the unfinished agenda of her novel; by her own account, she eliminated six or seven of Eva's stories from Eva Luna because the novel was simply too lengthy (Allende, 1988). Significantly, two of the stories that she left intact prefigured in theme and subversive flair the...