Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses

by Isabel Allende

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Isabel Allende

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In the autobiographical vein that several critics have pointed out in examination of Allende's works, the author herself is a character in this memoir/cookbook/list of aphrodisiacs. She introduces herself at the beginning as a woman at the doorstep of her fifties, "the last hour of dusk," in which she reflects on her life and her past "relationship with food and eroticism." However, Allende's larger focus is the power of sensory experience: she states that her memories are closely "associated with the senses." The reason for writing Aphrodite, she explains, is a celebration of her own sensual pleasures reawakening after a three-year period of mourning the death of her only daughter. Allende writes that a dream of diving into a pool filled with her favorite dessert, rice pudding, signaled her return to the joy of living; the book about the connection between food and sex naturally followed.

Allende uses examples from her private life in explaining how she developed her Epicurean philosophy of cooking and lovemaking: she recalls the scents of her childhood, the amorous and culinary adventures and teachings of her family members, erotic experiences from her youth to the recent days, and past and present sensual perceptions. The first-person narrative of Aphrodite allows the author/narrator to sound didactic and sympathetic at the same time. Although both technical and spiritual advice for better cooking and lovemaking abound throughout the text, Allende "jumps in" often to remind the reader of her main point—that the goal is to have fun with both of these enterprises. Personal anecdotes are very useful in bringing humor to an instructional text: Allende admits to her many culinary disasters to ease the reader's way through a list of sometimes complex recipes. She justifies her interest in these topics saying that, at her age, most couples need a bit of help in the department of sensual excitement.

Allende is candid about the personal view of her book: she openly and repeatedly declares her own preferences in selecting recipes, literary excerpts, and aphrodisiacs of the world for inclusion in Aphrodite. In the chapter entitled "The Orgy," she offers advice by imagining how she would prepare a perfect bacchanal; also, she provides the recipe for her appropriately named "Reconciliation Soup" that she prepares for her lover "after some terrible fight."

Finally, Allende discusses her romantic and marital experiences, making some generalizations about the erotic and entertaining factors in both. She offers her own recollections and wisdom derived from two marriages and several love affairs, concluding that love is an indispensable aphrodisiac—but, until the end, writing from her own viewpoint is the only reliable basis for her claims.

Other Characters

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Carmen Balcells
Allende gives her literary agent a place in the "Mea Culpa" section as well, thanking her for the support given for Aphrodite and for making her famous Catalan stew whenever the author visits her in Barcelona. Balcells is another hard-core chef, a confident ruler of her kitchen where, "wrapped in her apron, a kerchief around her head and a string of curses upon her lips," she creates miracles of aphrodisiac cuisine. The labor of several hours is always served on a richly embroidered tablecloth, among crystal goblets full of the best wine, in china of superb porcelain and with antique heavy silverware. Allende says the effort is worth it: "We eat up until our souls rise up sighing and the most hidden virtues of our wretched humanity are renewed as that blessed soup seeps into our bones, sweeping away with one stroke the fatigue of all the disappointments gathered along the road of life and restoring...

(This entire section contains 2042 words.)

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to us the uncontrollable sensuality of our twenties." Generous in her cooking as in her profession, Balcells provides her recipe for the Catalan soup in the chapter "The Orgy."

Christian Saints
Allende cites the self-punishment of the saints of the Middle Ages, whose abomination of the flesh as evil illustrates the extreme separation of body and soul in Christianity.

John Wayne Bobbitt
Bobbitt is the American husband whose wife, "fed up with violence and abuse," made international news when she cut off his penis. Allende illustrates the civilization's obsession with the male sexual organ, describing how the police on the case diligently searched the highway for the amputated piece which was immediately sewn back on and can now be seen in the pornographic movies starring Bobbitt.

Napoleon Bonaparte
A fan of the female scent au naturelle, the French ruler wrote to his beloved Josephine asking her not to bathe her private parts "in the weeks prior to his return from the battlefield." Josephine also relied on the seductive fragrance of violets to charm her lover.

The Butcher
In a story by the French writer Alina Reyes, a man purchases goat testicles from his butcher every week in order to "maintain his extraordinary sexual powers." Allende mentions the story to emphasize the reverence with which people treat the male organs.

Casanova
Allende describes the aphrodisiac power of oysters with an illustration of the famous lover's technique of seducing young novices by passing oysters from mouth to mouth. Casanova was also a big admirer of a woman's natural, private smell, and knew that the whispered word was a potent aphrodisiac.

Cleopatra
The Egyptian queen appears in Allende's book as a masterful seductress who used many sensuous approaches to create her feminine fame and power. Cleopatra soaked the sails of her ship in Damascus rose scent, which announced her arrival from miles away and served as her signature fragrance; the scent was a strong political statement during her visit to Rome, where Caesar's opponents were showered with the fragrance which soon became the fashion worn by all aristocratic women except Caesar's wife. The seductive queen also drove her lovers crazy by letting them lick the soft mixture of honey and ground almonds from her intimate parts.

Colomba
Allende's plump friend Colomba was almost seduced by her art professor during a picnic—almost, because a bull chased the unfortunate lovers into the woods and spoiled the professor's plan. The picnic included some highly aphrodisiac dishes, as the seducer wanted to charm his lady by indulging her gluttony.

Comtesse du Barry
Marie Jeanne Isabel Becu du Barry, a French courtesan from the beginning of the eighteenth century, turned orgy into an art; according to the author, her bacchanals were social events that shocked the aristocracy and gave her a reputation as a degenerate. Allende calls Madame du Barry "a rebellious and fearless spirit." The Comtesse died at the age of twenty-four.

Catherine the Great
The Russian Empress reportedly had "prodigious vitality" and an insatiable sexual appetite.

The Friend
Allende warns her readers against extreme measures in spicing up one's love life, and tells the story of a friend who, on a wonderful date with a woman, went to see her bedroom to "get an idea of the layout and plot his strategy" but ended up running away in fear, because the lady had a trapeze above the bed.

The Gigolo
The author recalls her conversation with a young male prostitute she met at an airport. The Gigolo does not rely on aphrodisiacs; everything is done naturally.

The Husband
Allende describes falling in love with her second husband despite all odds, mainly because of the skill with which he cooked for her the day after they met.

The Glove Vendor
Allende recalls a sensuous tactile experience she had years ago, when the clerk in a shop helped her buy gloves and aroused her with the touch of his hands on hers. The author lists that incident as an example of Tantric sexuality.

King Solomon
Allende mentions the old king's epic promiscuity in relation to the aphrodisiac power of variety. She also notes his enjoyment of spices and scents.

The Grandfather
Allende describes the patriarch of her family in childhood as a man of tradition, who did not like changes in the menu and made the entire family suffer the brewings of their unimaginative cook for years.

The Grandmother
Allende describes an incident in which her grandmother, usually an otherworldly-looking creature completely uninterested in the food on her plate, passed out when an admirer offered her a feast where the main course was a pair of guinea pigs, "intact from the tips of their stiff whiskers to the toenails of their tiny paws, encased in [a] shroud of glassy, shivering gelatin."

Hannah
Hannah is Allende's friend, whose disappointment at the looks of her blind date turned into fascination and powerful attraction when the man cooked an amazing meal for her. Like the author, Hannah serves to prove the argument that men who cook are irresistibly sexy.

Howard Hughes
In her argument that a modern obsession with variety often deprives people of the ultimate sensuality, Allende states that the famous playboy and millionaire died of "poverty of the senses and spirit," wasted from hunger and terrified of germs, alone in a motel room and looking like a concentration camp prisoner.

Lady Onogoro
A poet in the Court of Heian at the end of the tenth century, Lady Onogoro wrote outstanding and imaginative erotic stories. Allende gives the full text of "Death by Perfume," in which a deceived woman seduces her lover by applying scents and spices to his body, only to poison him with the deadly ones. The author also retells her story "The Cold Fish," in which a carp makes love to a young woman with more success than her human lover does.

Panchita Llona
Llona is the author's mother and the cook who provided (and perfected) most of the recipes included throughout and at the end of the book. Allende writes that her mother has never served the same meal twice, and can decipher any secret recipe by simply tasting the dish. The author further describes Llona's tremendous culinary abilities in an anecdote about their "mortifying" restaurant visits: the thorough chef would look at what other guests were eating ("sometimes so closely that she alarms the diners"), carefully inspect the menu, torture the waiter "with malicious questions that force him to go to the kitchen and return with written answers," make everyone order a different thing on the menu, take a Polaroid picture of the dinner, and then taste each meal so that she can later recreate it in her own kitchen. Llona is mentioned throughout the narrative in the author's memories of childhood as a stern overseeing influence who believes in "impeccable and honest execution," versus Allende's "creative bungling."

Llona provides the recipe for the elaborate delicacy from Easter Island, the curanto en olla, as well as the recipes in the last third of the book. She once spent weeks travelling from coast to coast in search of the authentic bouillabaisse recipe, which she finally obtained (but "how she got it is something she will never reveal as long as her husband is alive").

Lucasta
A renowned poisoner in the Roman Empire, Lucasta used the aphrodisiac irresistibility of mushrooms to commit many a murder during orgies.

Marquis de Sade
The ever-curious Marquis, whose name became a synonym for extreme sexual experimentation, reportedly ended up in jail for using a so-called love philter. Certain ladies, to whom the Marquis had given the stimulant known as the Spanish fly, almost died and experienced rather unpleasant side effects: they "fell to the floor and gnawed table legs," reports Allende.

Lola Montez
A famous nineteenth-century courtesan invented a seductive dance she called the tarantula; the performance, in whose raptures she would remove most of her veils, was so popular that nobody questioned Lola's claim that she was an aristocratic Spanish dancer.

Anais Nin
An early 20th-century writer who, like fellow writer Henry Miller, was paid by the page in the 1940s. They rebelled against their client ("the Collector") for asking them to "cut the poetry" and write pornography instead of erotica in their stories. Allende includes Nin's letter to the Collector as her own manifesto of sensuality.

Tio Ramon
The author's stepfather, her mother's second husband, often went through thorough preparations to create a love nest in the small apartment where the family lived in Beirut. Allende's childhood imagination was awakened by the mysterious activity behind the closed doors, where her stepfather romanced his wife in as much luxury as he could afford.

Scheherazade
The storyteller of the Arabic epic One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade is a young and wise woman who saves herself with the seductive powers of narrative. A sultan, catching his wife with another upon his sudden return from battle, takes revenge on women by possessing a virgin every night and killing her in the morning, before she has a chance to betray him. Scheherazade puts a stop to the bloody practice by telling the sultan a story and promptly stopping in the morning; the cruel monarch, in eager anticipation to hear how the story develops, lets her live another night—then another, until (after 1,001 nights of stories) the ritual murder is abolished. Allende uses the story as an illustration for the aphrodisiac nature of good storytelling.

Robert Shekter
Allende introduces Shekter, along with the other "accomplices" in the creation of her book, in a section entitled "Mea Culpa of the Culpable"; Shekter is the illustrator of Aphrodite. His sketches are the characters that emphasize the protagonists of Aphrodite: "bold nymphs and mischievous satyrs" that appear throughout the book.

Shekter contributes to the narrative with his memory of an orgy he once attended at a summer house in Sweden, with very little food but plenty of alcohol and marijuana, where participants courteously coupled amongst each other between discussions of Ingmar Bergman's films. A vegetarian ever since he accidentally shot a duck when he was a pilot in World War II, Shekter also provides the aphrodisiac recipe for a vegetable ratatouille.

Miki Shima
Allende's good friend and Japanese doctor, Shima tells her about the famous Japanese pillow-books—ancient erotic manuals closely studied by the male prostitutes in his country.

Tabra
Tabra is Allende's adventurous friend who, in a letter, describes her sensual experience of a feast she attended one night in Egypt.

The Tao Priestess
The most powerful female Tao master claimed that "reality is achieved only through sexual ecstasy." The legend says that she absorbed the male energy of her followers and remained beautiful and young as a seventeen-year-old, until her death at the age of five hundred. Allende tells the tale to depict the connection of carnal and spiritual bliss in some belief systems.

Aunt Teresa
Allende's angelic aunt, who "died with buds of embryonic wings upon her shoulder blades," is preserved in the author's memory along with the scent and taste of violet candy she always gave the children.

Diane de Poitiers
King Henry II of France fell madly in love with this lady, whose success was attributed to her skill in the technique of kabbazah ("squeezing and suctioning contractions of the muscles of their intimate parts").

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