49 pages • 1 hour read
Eva Luna
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Symbols & Motifs
Bolero
Bolero is the name of the telenovela which Eva writes in the latter half of the novel. The script for Bolero incorporates many of the fantastic events and irreverent characters Eva encounters throughout her life into a fictional plotline. This synthesis of reality and fiction is symbolic of an ongoing theme in Eva Luna, Reality and the Power of Storytelling.
Eva populates her first draft of Bolero with the people she has met in her various jobs and living situations. As she writes, she feels the past, present and future come together into one narrative. She is “living countless lives, speaking with many voices” (337). Her characters exit the pages and go gallivanting around the house, frustrating Elvíra. Elvíra’s acknowledgement of these characters as flesh-and-blood presences means that the boundary between the universe of fiction and the real world has been dissolved by Eva’s words.
Eva uses Bolero to manifest her love story with Rolf. As she is in the process of writing out a romantic kiss between her protagonists, Rolf interrupts her to declare his love and kiss her in exactly the manner she just described on paper. Her words seemingly alter the future—a literal representation of the way her talents have helped her achieve a fulfilling life.
Finally, Bolero serves as a vehicle to tell the story of the guerrilla escape after the narrative is censored by the government. Eva couches the truth in her script, thereby preserving it from corruption by the country’s highest powers. This literal preservation of the truth in a story is a microcosm of the way storytelling can be a tool of resistance in the face of systemic oppression.
A Thousand and One Nights
Eva Luna’s epigraph is a quote from A Thousand and One Nights: “Then he said to Scheherazade: ‘Sister, for the sake of Allah, tell us a story that will help pass the night’” (1). A Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights, is a set of Arabic folktales collected from cultures across the Middle East during the Golden Age of Islam. Eva Luna is compared to a modern Scheherazade, and as the narrative progresses, clear parallels emerge between the characters. The book serves as both a nod to Eva’s character and as a symbol of the lifechanging power of stories.
The framing device for these Arabic tales is the story of a woman named Scheherazade, who has married a king named Shahryār. As revenge for his previous wife’s infidelity, Shahryār has all his wives executed by morning after their wedding night. Scheherazade distracts Shahryār from his plan by telling him stories which end on a cliffhanger, so that he must keep her alive until the next night to hear their conclusion. In this manner, she survives for one thousand and one nights. Finally, Shahryār pardons Scheherazade.
Eva Luna has been compared to a modern Scheherazade for the way she uses storytelling as a tool of survival. While she does not have the immediate threat of execution hanging over her, Eva needs a way to sustain herself as she makes her way through the world on her own, fighting her “war with no end” (264). Like Scheherazade, Eva has a seemingly endless supply of stories to help her “pass the nights” of hard times. Both Eva Luna and the stories in A Thousand and One Nights incorporate heavy magical realism.
Allende herself discovered A Thousand and One Nights at the age of thirteen. In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, she revealed that the stories had inspired her own love of storytelling. The book has a similar effect on Eva: “Eroticism and fantasy [blow] into her life with the force a typhoon” (172), kicking off her sexual awakening and cementing her knowledge that she was born to be a storyteller. Allende’s inclusion of A Thousand and One Nights in Eva Luna strengthens the conceit that stories can shape lives.
The Palace of the Poor
The Palace of the Poor is a mansion which once served as El Benefactor’s summer house. By the time Eva glimpses it in Chapter 5, it has been taken over by poor families, who repurpose the structure into a communal living space. The government cannot drive them out because the structure can vanish and reappear at will. The Palace of the Poor symbolizes the contrast between the unnatural gluttony of the government and the virtue of a community which shares resources and integrates with the land.
Given that the Palace of the Poor can house an entire community, it must have been an absurdly large home for one man to occupy. El Benefactor’s decision to hoard this massive space for himself highlights the laughable gluttony of his dictatorship. By contrast, the community occupation is almost like a natural force. After El Benefactor leaves, families move in slowly, mimicking the way vegetation grows over abandoned structures and suggesting that this form of community living is a natural facet of human life.
Since the Palace appears only briefly to the eye “like a hallucination” (154), the government cannot evict its residents. It is as if the Palace is protected by a higher power, shielded from the corruption of the outside world. Eva characterizes the Palace as an alternate reality where “life continued without aggravation” (156)—a much-needed resting place for marginalized people.
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