My Invented Country: a memoir Isabel Allende Flamingo, 199pp, £18.99 ISBN 0007163096

I always thought Pablo Neruda was to blame for Chile's surfeit of poets. In Santiago there are dozens of them, all wearing tweeds and looking doleful. Once, on a visit there, I was approached by a sad and beautiful young man who said he wanted to write a poem about my eyes. It was flattering, until I found out that it would cost me five dollars.

According to Isabel Allende, poetry is deeply embedded in the Chilean soul. "No one who is born and lives in a natural world like ours can resist writing poetry. In Chile, you lift up a rock, and instead of a lizard out crawls a poet or a balladeer."

She nominates poeticism as the principal virtue of the Chilean people, but the greater part of this very entertaining book is given over to their manifold flaws. Allende has a gift for conversational writing and a sharp sense of humour, so this is where she has the most fun.

We learn that Chilean society is class-ridden and deeply chauvinistic, that 40 per cent of Chileans suffer from depression, and that 58 per cent of married women are unfaithful. The mothers are so controlling, writes Allende, that they make their Jewish and Italian counterparts look like dilettantes. But they are also modest and hard-working, and show off their industry by knitting on the buses.

Chileans are outwardly affectionate: "Older people are kissed mercilessly, even against their will. Women kiss, even if they hate each other, and they kiss any male within reach, and neither age nor social class nor hygiene can dissuade them." But they also love talking about people behind their backs, so no one wants to be first to leave a party.

The young women, Allende confides, are passionate and cling ferociously to their menfolk. She tells the story of a man who could not shake off his infatuated lover. When finally he made his escape, during siesta time, she chased him down the street naked and screaming, and the women of the barrio helped drag him back to bed.

My Invented Country is thus a portrait of Chile that blends acute observations with apocryphal anecdotes. There's the relation who used to take off his trousers in the street to give them to the poor and the grandmother who used telepathy to send recipes for apple pie to three friends who lived on the other side of the city. All four were terrible cooks, so there was no way to prove that the method worked.

That is the point: there is never a way to prove the truth of Allende's tall tales because, as she cleverly confesses, her memory is completely unreliable. In one passage she claims to be disturbed by this tendency "to transform reality, to invent memory", but elsewhere she says it isn't disturbing at all - which neatly illustrates how bad her memory must be.

This confusion between family history and imagination has proved a rich vein for Allende as well as for other "magical realists" such as Gabriel GarcIa Marquez. A whole generation of Latin American authors seems to be indebted to its grannies. Allende tells an anecdote about the great-grandmother of the novelist Jose Donoso and muses, enviously, "with an ancestor like her, think of all the delicious novels I could have written".

She has made the most of her family's secrets in such delicious novels as The House of the Spirits and Portrait in Sepia. More recently there has also been a memoir about her daughter Paula, who died of a rare genetic illness.

Here the focus is on her relationship with Chile, one that changed irrevocably with the end of President Salvador Allende's democratic government in 1973. The president was her father's cousin, and Allende was involved in the reforms of his socialist government. She does not go into details about that time - perhaps there is another book planned - but we know that after the coup she felt threatened enough to flee, with husband and children, to Venezuela.

Why was there so much support for the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet? Allende admits in retrospect that the socialist "adventure" was flawed: "We believed that it was possible to change people through indoctrination." After three years of experimentation, change and disorder people were weary. "Repression put an end to politicking, and neoliberalism forced Chileans to work, keep their mouths closed, and be productive."

But the much-vaunted economic recovery took a savage toll, says Allende. According to the World Bank, Chile is, along with Kenya and Zimbabwe, one of the countries with the most uneven distribution of income.

Allende now lives in San Francisco but often visits Chile. I very much enjoyed this visit to the other Chile, that half-remembered country of her imagination.

Miranda France is the author of Don Quixote's Delusions: travels in Castilian Spain (Orion)

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