And of Clay Are We Created

Isabel Allende’s “And of Clay Are We Created” is the final piece in her short story collection The Stories of Eva Luna. The collection, originally published in 1989 and printed in English in 1991, chronicles the tales that the writer Eva Luna tells her lover Rolf Carlé as they rest in bed. Allende fashions Eva Luna after Scheherazade, a key character in the framing narrative for the multi-tale Middle Eastern epic A Thousand and One Nights. The Stories of Eva Luna received widespread critical and commercial acclaim, further establishing the best-selling author as a contemporary literary giant. Though the stories in the collection traverse the spheres of magical realism, fantasy, and realism, “And of Clay Are We Created” belongs to the latter genre. The piece’s opening, with one of its primary characters suspended in mud while much of the world mills uselessly about her, seems to invite one’s suspension of disbelief. Yet Allende largely bases this story on the true predicament of 13-year-old Omayra Sánchez Garzón, a Colombian girl who became trapped up to her waist in a 1985 mudslide and died days later, the systems around her unable to rescue her in time.