The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The House of the Spirits
Book Review: An enduring favorite.
Summary: 5 Stars
"I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of the past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously--as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space" (p. 432).
Since her 1982 debut novel, THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS (La Casa de los Esp?ritus), Isabel Allende has been recognized as one most gifted novelists in the world today. Born in Lima, Peru, Allende is the daughter of Chilean ambassador Tom?s Allende, and the niece of Salvador Allende, the President of Chile from 1970 to 1973. When she learned in 1981 that her 90-year-old grandfather was dying, Allende began writing him a letter that later became the manuscript of THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS (www.isabelallende.com). Set in politically turbulant times, the novel tells the multi-generational story of family endurance through Esteban Trueba's writings and his wife Clara's diary entries, as compiled by their granddaughter, Alba. The narrative structure shifts frequently. The novel begins and ends with Clara's childhood diary entry on Holy Thursday, "Barrabas came to us by sea," and examines the lives of primarily four truly memorable characters in between: (1) Esteban Trueba, the volatile family patriarch and land tyrant driven by rage and violence; (2) Clara Trueba, the elusive, clara-voyant family matriarch and center of the Trueba family, who marries Esteban not for love, but for her own inexplicable reasons following many years of silence after the death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful; (3) their soft-spoken yet rebellious first-born daughter, Blanca, whose passions fuel her father's lifelong contempt, even as it produces the one grandchild Esteban adores; and (4) Alba, Blanca's beautiful, forbidden love child who, like her great-aunt Rosa, has luminous green hair.
With its multi-generational themes, magical realism, and dreamlike quality, Allende's novel seems to borrow heavily from Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.), and with its shifting narrative structure, THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS seems to borrow heavily from Faulkner. Allende's HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS ranks easily as one of my all-time favorite novels, right up there with Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction), and is highly recommended for those who want to experience a novel at the top of its form.
G. Merritt