Ever the Outsider : Novelist Isabel Allende has been an exile, a stranger, and a woman in a man’s world.

SAUSALITO —  Isabel Allende, Latin America’s dona of literature, has found a new inspiration for her fiction. It’s here, Northern California, where the tree huggers roam and being weird is relative.

“My publishers were horrified,” says the Chilean writer. “They said, ‘No more banana republics? No more bloody military coups? No more dancing around with ghosts?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I moved to California!’

“When I moved here six years ago, it was obvious that I would have to write about this place. I have met very few normal human beings. Most of them are into channeling, organic chickens, saving whales, divorce gurus. Those not searching for Buddha are searching for the perfect cappuccino. “

Noted for her Latin American heroines, in her most recent novel Allende has created protagonist Gregory Reeves, an Anglo-American. A bestseller in Latin America and Europe, “The Infinite Plan,” her fifth work of fiction, was published this month in the United States by HarperCollins.

The novel sweeps over decades from the 1940s to the present and across a California landscape including the Los Angeles barrio where Gregory Reeves grows up, Berkeley, Vietnam and San Francisco in the bingeing ‘80s.

“As an outsider, I’m in a privileged position,” Allende says. “While everyone takes everything for granted, I’m always asking questions and I get unusual answers.”

“ ‘The Infinite Plan’ ,” she says, “is about a whole generation of people who have been defeated by the American dream. It was a generation brought up with the values of the Second World War, and they didn’t work (anymore). Then they went through the ‘50s, the ‘60s, the Vietnam War--all the brutal changes that happened in this society.”

California was transformed with the swelling Latino barrios of Los Angeles, which defied the city’s “uniquely American obsession with living in perfect health, beauty, and happiness,” she writes. “Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were putting their stamp on the place: their scorn for pain and death, their poverty, fatalism . . . but also their music, highly spiced food, and exuberant sense of color.”

Into this world she drops Reeves, son of an itinerant preacher who proclaims everything in the universe happens according to a mystical infinite plan.

“It was more original, more unusual, to tell it from the perspective of the white American male, the people who never experience racism,” Allende says. “Even white women experience some sort of segregation in this country. But the owners of the planet are the white males.”

Allende has just begun a publicity tour for “The Infinite Plan” in the United States and Europe that won’t end until July. It comes at a difficult time for her, only a few months after the death of her 29-year-old daughter. Paula Frias, born with porphyria, an enzyme deficiency that isn’t inevitably fatal, became ill in Spain in 1992. Allende brought her to her home in San Rafael, and she died Dec. 6 after a year in a coma.

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When Allende, 50, was a child, an uncle convinced her that the characters in his books escaped their pages and roamed the house at night. “When the lights went off,” she says, “I could hear them--bandits, courtesans, princes, witches, tyrants.”

Sometimes described as a magical realist, Allende draws no lines between imagination and reality.

“The first time I met Isabel, I was in an audience,” recalls novelist Amy Tan, a friend. “I was wondering what she’d be like. In my mind, she was larger than life. She’d probably have a trail of ghosts behind her. And when she came on stage, a swath of blue chiffon feathers was falling off her shoulders. She pointed to her side and said, ‘My grandmother is with me,’ as though the ghost were really there. The way she talked about it, you could feel it: You could see her grandmother.”

Allende did not start writing fiction until she was 39 and was heralded as the first major female literary voice from Latin America with the publication of her first novel, “The House of the Spirits,” which was released in the United States in 1985. “Of Love and Shadows,” “Eva Luna” and “The Stories of Eva Luna” followed.

Ten million copies of her books have been published in 27 languages. “The House of the Spirits” has been filmed by Oscar-winning Danish director Billie August for release this fall. The movie stars Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, and the writer says she is pleased with the production so far.

And yet, though she is to Latina writers today what men like Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes were to her years ago--and has helped open the doors to publishers for Latin American women writers--she says she is not completely accepted.

“At the beginning, I felt it was very flattering to be compared to (Gabriel) Garcia Marquez. Now, I get mad. This is my fifth book. If I were a man, no one would be comparing me to anybody.”

The child of a diplomat, Allende was reared in Chile, Bolivia, Europe and the Middle East, and she recalls feeling painful isolation. “We were moving all the time, so I remember saying goodby to places and people.”

She also resented the patriarchal culture of Chileans. “I wanted to be a man since I was five. I remember the moment. My mother was teaching me how to knit. And through the window, I could see the garden, and my brothers were playing in the tree. I was sitting, trying to pass the thread through this needle with these awkward little hands, and my mother said, ‘Sit with your legs crossed like a lady.’

“I realized then what a terrible disadvantage it was to be a woman. I saw how powerful my grandfather was. His wishes were orders. He would come and leave the house like a king, and the only way my mother could get any attention was if she was sick. So my mother was sick all the time. I wanted to be strong like my grandfather to protect my mother.”

Allende married a Chilean civil engineer when she was 19, and eventually became a journalist known for her outspoken feminist views. “I was a lousy journalist,” she says. “I would put myself in the middle of everything. Lie all the time, never be objective. And if I didn’t have a story, I made it up.”

She continued working and had two children. Then in 1973, her uncle, President Salvador Allende, was slain during the CIA-backed military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Allende’s parents fled to Buenos Aires.

Two years later, she and her family slipped out of the country. They lived in exile in Venezuela for 13 years. She was an outsider once again.

“ ‘House of the Spirits’ was about “the desire to recover everything that I had lost” in Chile, Allende says of her first book, which began as a spiritual letter to her dying grandfather.

“ ‘Of Love and Shadows’ is about anger. Anger for the dictatorship, the abuses and the torture,” she says. “ ‘Eva Luna’ is a happy story; it’s about being a woman. It took me a long time to accept that it’s not that bad to be a woman.”

At 45, Allende initiated an amicable divorce from her husband. “My idea was I would be alone for the rest of my life,” she says. “I thought I was too old for anything else. I was scared. I thought I would have to sleep alone the rest of my life. Then a couple of months later, I met Willie.”

During a visit to the Bay Area, Allende met San Francisco attorney William Gordon, 55. She says she immediately flew home to Venezuela and told her son she was in love. He told her to go back and spend a week seeing Gordon to get him out of her system. She never returned.

“I moved into his house,” she says. “Twenty-four hours later, I asked him if we had some sort of commitment.” The couple has been married for five years and live in San Rafael.

Allende begins her days with a letter to her mother in Chile, a way of “warming up the language.” She writes at a cottage in Sausalito, a few blocks from the bay.

On her desk is a book of poems by Neruda. And there are three photographs: her grandmother, mother and her daughter Paula. A burning candle represents their “soft presence” in her life. Allende cared for her daughter at home during her last year. “That year at Paula’s bedside was just pain, raw pain,” she says. “As soon as I saw her, I knew she would die. I started crying, and she said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And I said, ‘Because I love you and I’m very scared.’ And she said, ‘I love you too,’ and then she went into the coma.”

On the day Paula died, family members gathered for a Buddhist ceremony, the room full of flowers and candles. “We allowed her to go. We told her we would remember her; she would be alive with us.”

As Allende is talking, her two grandchildren, the son and daughter of her son Nicolas Frias, burst in. The writer scoops up her grandson Alejandro, nuzzles his face and speaks to him in Spanish.

Life and death, she says, walk side by side.