Isabel Allende habla sobre El Viento conoce mi nombre, su nueva novela
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00:00Thank you very much, as always, to the great writer Isabel Allende.
00:08What a pleasure to see you again.
00:10We consider you part of the People family in Spanish.
00:13Thank you very much.
00:15I'm very excited because, well, we're talking about this new book,
00:18which is very beautiful, El Viento Conoce Mi Nombre.
00:21It's a book that starts with a lot of emotions, to vary.
00:25It immediately starts to move a lot of things.
00:28First of all, I would like to ask you how the book started.
00:32It started with Trump's policy of separating families.
00:37When in 2018 it came out in the press and everywhere
00:40that they were separating families,
00:42they took the babies from their mothers' arms
00:45and those terrible pictures with the children in cages appeared.
00:49My foundation works with refugees and immigrants.
00:54We help programs.
00:56We quickly got in touch with the people we work with.
01:02And that's when I started to find out about the cases.
01:05Because when they give you a figure,
01:07when they tell you there are 2,000 children,
01:10it doesn't mean anything until you see the child's face,
01:13know his name, hear his story.
01:15Then everything changes.
01:17And so that was the origin of the book.
01:22There are several characters that we see in the book.
01:27And it connects past with present.
01:30Could you briefly describe to the people in Spanish
01:33what the novel is about?
01:36Well, the novel begins shortly before the Second World War,
01:42when some Jewish families had to separate from their children
01:46and send them on a train to an unknown destination
01:49to be picked up, who knows who, in England.
01:52England received 10,000 Jewish children as refugees,
01:55without their parents.
01:5790% of those children never heard from their families again.
02:00They were all killed.
02:02So this is the story of one of those children
02:05who at 6 years old, his name is Samuel,
02:08he separates from his mother and lives with a hole in his heart
02:12and has been traumatized all his life.
02:14But he makes a living.
02:16He's a musician.
02:18He has a very limited, very careful, very protected life.
02:21He doesn't want to be bothered.
02:23He doesn't want to know anything.
02:25He has a fantastic woman who does all kinds of crazy things.
02:29He doesn't want to know what the woman does
02:31so he doesn't have to confront her.
02:33Well, and that's how life goes.
02:35He grew up in the pandemic.
02:37The man is 86 years old.
02:39He is locked in his house with a woman from El Salvador,
02:43who is his housekeeper.
02:45And at 86 years old,
02:47there he is with time to meditate on his life
02:50and he realizes, and he says it in a part,
02:53I have sinned with indifference.
02:56And that sin is paid sooner or later.
02:59And at that moment, Anita appears in their life,
03:02a blind girl who has been separated from her mother on the border.
03:06And then he opens up for the first time to the risk.
03:10He opens his house, opens his life, opens his heart
03:14to accept this girl and their relationship.
03:19And people like the social visitor,
03:23like the lawyer,
03:25the people who work to improve the situation.
03:29Because look, Mayra, we always hear the bad.
03:32We hear all the tragedy, all the bad things that happen.
03:35The maras, the drug traffickers, the corrupt police,
03:38how they rape women.
03:40We all know that.
03:41Nobody ever talks about the people who were dedicating their lives to help.
03:46I was very moved by the book, I really loved it.
03:49And I was thinking, well, in those years, terrible years,
03:53I want to call them that, and I don't want to be partial,
03:56but it was really terrible for us Hispanics in this country.
03:59In the years of President Trump's administration,
04:03there were many photos and many stories of children
04:07who were locked up, separated, who died crossing the river.
04:10Parents hugging the lifeless bodies of very young children.
04:14I wonder if any of those scenes in some way
04:17also inspired you to create this work.
04:21Look, I've been in the last novels I've written,
04:25I would say that the last four novels deal with the issue of displaced people.
04:30Because it is a very important issue in my life,
04:34and with that I work at the Foundation.
04:37I am a displaced person, luckily.
04:40I lived my entire childhood moving from one place to another
04:43because my stepfather was a diplomat.
04:45Then I was a political refugee.
04:47And then I was an immigrant.
04:49But when I was a political refugee,
04:51I didn't have to line up at the border like they are doing here.
04:55I simply went to Venezuela,
04:58which was a happy, open, rich country,
05:01which received millions of immigrants,
05:03where there was room for everyone.
05:06Then, when I came to the United States,
05:08I was never undocumented,
05:10because I fell in love with an American,
05:13we got married,
05:14and I was always legal here.
05:18And also, the most important thing,
05:21I didn't have to make a living cleaning signs,
05:24or doing the work that no one else wanted to do,
05:27because I could make a living writing.
05:29So, in that sense, I was a displaced person,
05:32but very privileged.
05:35But I understand how you feel
05:38when you have to leave everything
05:40and start all over again,
05:42especially when you're escaping.
05:45And it's very hard.
05:47So, for me, it's a very recurring theme.
05:51Thank you very much for being here again
05:54at Book Corner, The People in Spanish.
05:56We thank you, as always, for your time.
05:58And we thank you for this great work,
06:00which is, as always, a great gift for us.
06:02Thank you, Mayra. Thank you very much.