[In the following review of Paula, Ruta faults Allende's writing as overly sentimental and criticizes Allende for failing to more fully develop Paula's character.]

"All sorrows can be borne," Isak Dinesen once said, "if you put them into a story or tell a story about them." That approach worked well for Isabel Allende—until lately. When her beloved grandfather lay dying she wrote him a letter that became her first, and most successful, novel, The House of the Spirits. Grieving for Chile under Pinochet, she wrote Of Love and Shadows. As her first marriage collapsed, she invented the ebullient, upbeat heroine of Eva Luna.

But when her 27-year-old daughter, Paula, fell ill in December 1991 with a hereditary metabolic disorder known as porphyria and quickly lapsed into a coma, the writer's courage failed her. Then her agent, Carmen Balcells, showed up at the Madrid hospital with a stack of yellow note pads. This memoir is the result, and it is Ms. Allende's best work to date.

A mother trying to entertain a bedridden child, she piles on episode and anecdote in a brilliant flood of autobiographical reminiscence spanning three generations on four continents. A real-time account of Paula's illness—the coma lasted a year—and her family's anguish intervenes with increasing insistency, until the two narrative threads dwindle to one, which snaps with the young woman's death in December 1992. Celebration rather than despair provides the overriding tone.

Ms. Allende's fiction often deals in flat folkloric archetypes: the patriarch, the dandy, the peasant. Here we meet their complex, unpredictable sources. Her maternal grandfather is an invincible old stoic who suppresses pneumonia by cinching his waist with a leather harness—breaking his ribs in the process. he takes his small granddaughter to wrestling matches, and lusts for blood from his ringside seat. Ms. Allende's father, a decadent aristocrat, disappears when she's an infant. Her stepfather, a charming diplomat, teaches her debating tricks and social skills. She reads his unexpurgated Thousand and One Nights on the sly. Ms. Allende invokes these family spirits and many others with tremendous verve, generous detail and irresistibly rhythmic prose, as if her narrative could distract death itself. Margaret Sayers Peden's translation does ample justice to the original.

We expect memoirs to reveal secrets that fiction delicately masks. (A generation that never read Cheever's stories battened on his posthumously published journals.) In Paula, Ms. Allende reveals a secret that elucidates the knot of sex and violence and class hatred that ties The House of the Spirits into such a neat package. She renders an incident of childhood sexual abuse with Proustian honesty and attention to sensuous and psychological detail. The middle-aged narrator caught up in her story, relishes the telling (if not the fact) of the child's initiation into pleasure and terror.

Love, discipline and foreign travel—to Lebanon and Bolivia with her diplomat stepfather—produce a self-possessed and enterprising young Isabel. She starts writing for magazines in her early 20's and later moves into television reporting; in the course of her work, she interviews "murderers, seers, prostitutes, necrophiliacs, jugglers, quasi-saints who performed nebulous miracles, demented psychiatrists and beggars with false stumps who rented babies to put a dent in charitable hearts."

Ms. Allende expects no praise for the risks she took to help fellow Chileans on Pinochet's hit lists. On the contrary, she questions the rash action that forced her family into exile. And she tells jokes on herself with good grace. When she was a young reporter, Pablo Neruda once chided her, "You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do."

Right he was. Ms. Allende's literary breakthroughs, her divorce and remarriage dominate the second half of the book. It could have been called Isabel. And therein lies the deep unspoken pathos of this work, with its unusual combination of self-affirmation and loss. Other writers separate the two. Think, for example, of Paul Monette's elegiac AIDS memoir for his lover, Afterlife, and his luminous autobiography, Becoming a Man. Ms. Allende, recording her triumphs, is desperate to share her overflowing vitality with her daughter. What's a mother for? She succeeds only in marking the distance between herself and Paula—the confident survivor and the stricken young woman.

The reader, meanwhile, strains to know Paula better. Hearing of her goodness, brilliance and grace is not enough. One astounding remark begs for further comment. As Isabel recalls it, she once offered to buy Paula three new blouses. "We go to our grave in a winding sheet," her daughter responded. "Why do you bother?" We're left to guess at the complex complementarity of a flamboyant, self-dramatizing mother and her ascetic, deeply religious child.

Ms. Allende does report, with disarming honesty, that Paula hated her mother's sentimentality. We can't disagree. Family members caring for Ms. Allende's daughter are uniformly ennobled by the crisis. Recriminations and petty quarrels don't seem to intrude. Either these people are more civilized than you and I (which is entirely possible) or Ms. Allende has simply eliminated the negative. High-flown rhetoric obscures some of her introspective passages.

And yet, in her reportorial mode she's unbeatable. Consider, for example, this description of one of Paula's fellow patients in the hospital ward in Madrid:

Aurelia dances and sings flamenco; she speaks in rhymes and, unless I keep a close watch, she sprays you with her lilac perfume and paints your lips bright red. She makes fun of doctors, healers and nuns alike, she thinks they are all a gang of butchers…. In the meantime, the police drop by to question the raped girl, and the way they treat her you would think she was the perpetrator, not the victim, of the crime…. Aurelia is the only one with enough brass to take them on. She plants herself before them with her hands on her hips and bawls them out…. She has three suitcases of flashy clothes under her bed, and changes several times a day; she piles on the makeup and whips her hair into a mousse of bleached curls. At the least provocation, she strips to show us her Renaissance flesh…. And she adds with a touch of pique that her attributes don't do her much good since her husband is a eunuch.

Journalism was what Isabel Allende did in her freewheeling youth, before she discovered she could write novels. Neruda's jibe notwithstanding, she does it wonderfully well. As Paula courageously reveals, she has everything it takes: the ear, the eye, the mind, the heart, the all-encompassing humanity.