[In the following interview, Allende discusses her views of American culture, her place in literature, and the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.]

[Skafidas]: Until you and your family were forced to flee Pinochet's government after the coup against [your uncle] Salvador Allende, you had lived your life in Chile. You come from a culture and a family that, for good reason, has been suspicious of or even hostile toward America. As you have said, Henry Kissinger is no less guilty than Augusto Pinochet for the crimes that took place in Chile during the 1973 coup. Now that you have lived in the US for more than a decade, how do you evaluate America?

[Allende]: In the US I live in a sort of bubble. To start with, I am a legal immigrant and am married to an American. I have resources and a job that gives me a privileged status. But this does not mean I can't see how other people live.

One of the problems I see in America is the denial of pain. Americans constantly deny reality—they deny pain, aging, poverty, homelessness, failure of any kind, fat or anything that has to do with the dark side of life. And our culture and media promote this denial by exalting wealth, youth, beauty, health, strength.

There is another cultural gap that is also very hard for me to live with. I come from a culture where community, family and extended family are very important. In the US I feel isolated. I have tried for 11 years to put together an extended family, but it is artificial in many ways; it does not work naturally.

Of course, I'm not the only one who feels this isolation. In the US there is a crisis now with the family, and there is a conscious effort to return family to its proper place in society. But this is difficult because the community doesn't hold the family together. People move so much here. By the time you are 18 it's expected that you leave your home. You go to college, you break with your family—that is the tradition.

This is a very individualistic country whose only real value is to be self-made. In my culture, it's not a virtue to be self-made; the virtue is to belong to something—community, tribe, village, family.

In other countries, especially in Latin America, you don't expect the government or the health insurance company to take care of you. Your family will; it is a very organic process. Even if you don't like them too much, your family is your only safety net.

But lately, there is a strong trend toward spirituality in America—it's almost like a need for redemption from feelings of loneliness and isolation. Even if this spiritual quest is happening on a superficial level, it is still an indication that people have started looking in a different direction for redemption. It shows that despite relative comfort and prosperity people are still missing something vital: love.

On the positive side I also see many good things about the US: democracy, for one; another is feminism. These aspects of American culture can have a real impact on the rest of the world. With regard to feminism, it will be impossible to censor the contributions women have made in American politics and culture. Information is now global, so that even in a village in Africa you get the sitcoms, movies, news—everything that reflects the undeniable influence of women in America today. Women will really change the balance of power in the next century, and Americans are leading the way.

In the US, your books have been more successful than any other Latin American writer. How do you explain this?

First, I have a very good translator who helps convey the spirit of each book while also adapting it to the new culture. She says things like, “This sentence will not sound good in English. It's very sentimental.” In Latin culture, for example, we talk about destiny. In America, “destiny” is a loaded word. You say “luck” or “fate.” So, by the choice of words my translator adapts my work to the culture.

I also think that the mixture of honest emotion, feminism, politics and the bringing of other cultures into the book fascinates Americans. People in the US are touched by the raw and explicit emotion of my books. Because, as I said before, this is a culture in which people deny or withhold their emotions.

With more than 30 million books sold, you are considered one of the most successful writers in the world. How much power does a popular writer have in the age of Internet?

Not much. My power is relative. I don't think my books will substantially change cultures. When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in the US, for example, books had the power to cause change. Uncle Tom's Cabin made an impact. With regard to slavery, it really moved the consciousness of a nation. The time was ripe and literature was the only medium for that kind of change.

Today, we have the Internet, movies, television. People are much more visual, so that the impact of a book is not that big. This is not a pessimistic but a realistic view. Also, I know that people who buy my books already agree with my worldview. It's very unlikely that a right-wing fundamentalist would read any of my books. As a matter of fact, some Catholic groups, including Opus Dei, forbid the reading of several of my books. In some Mormon schools in Utah they won't allow my books because of the politics or sometimes because of the sexual explicitness.

As a female writer have you experienced prejudice?

When I started, it was very hard for me to get published because in Latin America nobody wanted to read books by women—or at least that's what the publishers said. Then I got an agent in Spain who really pushed my first book The House of the Spirits and got it published. The idea of getting an agent came one day when a secretary at one of the publishing houses called and said that shed taken my manuscript home and read it. “I don't know much about literature,” she said, “but I think this is good.” But she also told me to offer it to another house because no one where she worked would read it. She ended the conversation by saying, “You need an agent.”

This is the case with many women writers. Women are looked down on when it comes to ideas. Anything that a woman creates from scratch is not considered serious. She can follow somebody else's lead; she can play beautiful music, for instance, but she cannot compose music. In literature, it's only in the last 15 or 20 years that women have broken through the conspiracy of silence with regard to their work and have begun to be taken seriously as writers.

Until The House of the Spirits was published, there was no major female Latin American novelist. You have emerged from a profoundly male-dominated genre. Your success, I suppose, has annoyed some people.

This is true. Carlos Fuentes has been very supportive, but he is an exception. Many other successful male Latin American writers don't like the fact that I sell so many books. They are envious and denounce my books as not real literature. You see, a good book should not sell! I am a storyteller. I do not write for myself but for an audience, and I need to know that someone will read what I am writing, whether it's to million people or one person.

Is there a special bond between a woman writer and a woman reader?

Not at all. So-called “women's literature” is a marketing creation, not a literary one. That 60 percent of the world's readers are women who want to read novels does not mean that the books they read are “women's literature.” The cliche goes that men prefer to read how-to books or nonfiction. I don't take these things seriously. I write for everybody. If women tend to like my books more than men it is because my stories come from a woman's own history. But men like my books, too. One cannot have specific statistics, but I don't think The House of the Spirits was less liked by men than women.

Through books such as The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, and Paula, you have created a unique literary genre. Was that a conscious decision?

No. I never studied literature and my reading has never been organized. Everything has come from within, from what I know. My writing has been inspired and ignited by memory. But it is also true that as far as my background is concerned, I feel neutral when it comes to writing. I don't necessarily write as a Latin American, or at least it doesn't feel this way. My experience, my tradition, stems from Latin America, but I always try to put this experience into a universal perspective.

Carlos Fuentes has said that “the novelist is not someone who reflects the truth, but is the one who creates reality—and in order to create reality you must tell lies.” You've said that “I only express what exists. I don't invent anything.” Is there any common ground between these two viewpoints?

Of course. I guess we are both saying the same thing with different words. I lie all the time when I write fiction. That you choose what to tell and how to tell it is a form of lying. When you decide what to omit you are twisting reality. However, with these lies you present something that is basically true. If it isn't basically true, then you have romance novels, thrillers or mysteries, which are forms of entertainment but are not real literature.

People find interest in a book because they see something from their own reality reflected there. Even if the characters are invented, what you have to say about the characters has to be true and believable. This is the first duty of the fiction writer, but it is very hard because sometimes reality is not true in the strict sense. An example from a few years ago comes to mind: A child was dying of hunger in Ethiopia. At the time people were indifferent to the suffering there because it appeared too much on television. But then a camera followed one little child to his death and suddenly it became real—that child could be anybody's child. The suffering became immediate and urgent.

However, it was discovered later that the cameraman had faked this story, in a way. The child he had followed with his camera was not the same as the dead child he later captured on film. The story was not exactly true, but it reflected the truth: the hunger was true; the place; the time; the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of children, were all true. So perhaps that one child's death had to be faked in order to bring out the truth.

A few years ago, in an interview for NPQ, you said that “it will be impossible for the new (Chilean) government to punish all those who should be punished: the torturers won't be tortured; the rapists won't be raped; the murderers won't be killed. And people will have to understand that it is not out of revenge that we will rebuild our country but out of love and forgiveness.” The recent arrest of General Pinochet in London has brought with it the possibility that perpetrators of crimes against humanity will finally be held accountable: Pinochet may well become the scapegoat for all this century's dictators.

At the same time, many Chileans are not happy with the turn of events. As you argued recently, many Chileans see the intervention of Spain and Britain as colonialist. What do you think should happen to Pinochet? Would you rather deal with him the way Mandela's South Africa dealt with its own painful past—amnesty but not amnesia?

For the sake of democracy and for the next government in Chile what is desirable is that Pinochet return to Chile. However, for the sake of history and of Pinochet's victims, he needs to be tried somewhere, even if he's tried in absentia. A trial means that it will become impossible for his supporters to continue hiding the truth, not only in Chile but also in the US.

Some Americans should be tried as well. But this will not happen because there is a double standard and a very colonial attitude when it comes to Third World countries. When less powerful nations are tried in the court of world opinion, Europe and America become the judges. But these powerful nations resist being judged themselves.

Chilean stability is heavily dependent on Pinochet's fate. There is still division and controversy over his name. The good thing is that, thanks to his arrest, the wind has changed in Chile. I was there a few weeks ago and to my astonishment I heard people on television for the first time calling Pinochet “the ex-dictator” as opposed to “senator for life.” Morally, Pinochet is destroyed. The embarrassment of his arrest has stigmatized him for life. He won't go down in history the way he had planned.

But now it should be left up to the Chileans to try him and demystify his evil. The big lie still holds strong for some: his wonderful economic legacy; without him Chile would have never been the modern country it has become. Chile may be modern, but at whose expense? In Pinochet's Chile, the poor never became middle class, whereas the rich became richer. Greed became religion. Everything worked in favor of the few powerful capitalists and against the working class which was never allowed to form unions or protect its interests. So, to say that Pinochet was good enough because he improved the economy is like saying that Mussolini was a good leader because the trains were on time.

Pinochet did make improvements in the economy. He changed patterns and models of inefficiency, but at a tremendous cost. I wonder if people who applaud his economic policy would be willing to have it in their own countries at that cost—if the Americans, who approve so much, would be willing to have 17 years of a brutal dictatorship in order to have an economic improvement that only benefits certain people.

Sometimes I ask myself whether I want Pinochet to vot in prison. And the answer is no. I really don't. I see him as he is: an old man. And if his return to Chile means less trouble for Chile, then let him return. For God's sake, he's caused enough trouble for the past 25 years. Let's not perpetuate it. Chile's democracy is still very fragile, and in order for it to grow stronger the last thing it needs is Pinochet's ghost hanging around.