4.2 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Isabel Allende, Magic Realism, The Foundling
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0:00.0 | In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers. |
0:08.0 | But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA |
0:12.0 | was himself an informer, a secret British army agent with the codename Stakeknife. |
0:18.0 | Who gets to play God? And why me? Why my family? |
0:21.3 | When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe? |
0:25.1 | I wouldn't even know where to start, and I'm with the IRA. |
0:28.5 | Steakknife. |
0:29.7 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
0:33.5 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
0:37.6 | Hello, we explored the displaced today, from foundlings in 18th century London to refugees in Franco, Spain, when I'm joined in a moment by the mother of magic realism, whose own life has at times competed for narrative intensity with her fiction. |
0:53.8 | As a young woman, Isabelle Aende was forced to flee Venezuela when her uncle, the Chilean |
0:58.9 | president, Salvador Ayende, died during the military coup of General Pinochet. |
1:04.3 | So began a life in motion, but also a writing career. |
1:08.2 | Her best-selling debut, The House of the Spirits, began life as a letter |
1:11.7 | written in exile to her grandfather. 23 further books have followed, including her non-fiction |
1:17.8 | account of the premature death of her daughter, the eponymous Paula, which also began life |
1:23.0 | in epistolary form. Recurring themes of displacement against political upheaval define many of |
1:29.7 | Aende's stories, and her latest, a long petal of the sea, is a prime example. It begins at the end of the |
1:36.5 | Spanish Civil War, with the true story of poet Pablo Neruda's chartering of a boat to take refugees |
1:42.8 | escaping the brutal war in Spain to Chile. |
1:46.2 | Here's the moment they finally reached the shoreline. |
1:49.2 | The Winnipeg sailed on toward the south of Chile, Neruda's long petal of sea, wine and snow. |
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