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calarco 's review for:
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
How I have gone this long without reading The House of the Spirits is beyond me. Isabel Allende is undoubtedly an author who definitely deserves her buzz and cultural praise.
Following three generations of women—Clara, Blanca, and Alba—this story explores not just individual lives, but people as they are within their greater familial networks. While individualism is the norm in the United States, for most people with Latin American heritage it is near impossible to understand a person without also understanding that person’s family. Being Peruvian American, to this day if someone asks me to explain my background, I can’t not at least “briefly” mention my parents and grandparents.
Allende’s narrative takes place in Chile and is a truly accurate reflection of the country’s shifting politics. While never explicitly named, the dread of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship builds with powerful inevitability as seen with the actions of the family’s conservative patriarch Esteban Trueba. Just as Trueba interferes with his daughter’s affair with a prominent working-class hero, so too does Pinochet’s conservative totalitarian regime overthrow Chile’s democratically elected socialist government. In this novel what transpires at the personal level, is a direct reflection of what is happening at national scale.
It would be impossible to review this book without comparing it to Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both novels are famous tales that follow families across generations and are fueled by magical realism. While Márquez’s style is more refined, I found Allende’s focus on interpersonal messiness to be both more effective and affective for channeling the chaos of the time. This also fed into well-rounded character development, as Allende’s character of Clara is essentially a more fully fleshed-out version of Márquez’s Remedios the Beauty. So if you enjoy stories about weird, magical women then this story will most definitely fit the bill.
Overall, The House of the Spirits is pretty amazing. My only critique would lie with how even though power shifts among different players, its brutality is more-or-less written off as a primordial occurrence and never truly challenged as a concept. That said, there is still a great deal of layered nuance interwoven in this tale, and I absolutely recommend it.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Following three generations of women—Clara, Blanca, and Alba—this story explores not just individual lives, but people as they are within their greater familial networks. While individualism is the norm in the United States, for most people with Latin American heritage it is near impossible to understand a person without also understanding that person’s family. Being Peruvian American, to this day if someone asks me to explain my background, I can’t not at least “briefly” mention my parents and grandparents.
Allende’s narrative takes place in Chile and is a truly accurate reflection of the country’s shifting politics. While never explicitly named, the dread of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship builds with powerful inevitability as seen with the actions of the family’s conservative patriarch Esteban Trueba. Just as Trueba interferes with his daughter’s affair with a prominent working-class hero, so too does Pinochet’s conservative totalitarian regime overthrow Chile’s democratically elected socialist government. In this novel what transpires at the personal level, is a direct reflection of what is happening at national scale.
It would be impossible to review this book without comparing it to Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both novels are famous tales that follow families across generations and are fueled by magical realism. While Márquez’s style is more refined, I found Allende’s focus on interpersonal messiness to be both more effective and affective for channeling the chaos of the time. This also fed into well-rounded character development, as Allende’s character of Clara is essentially a more fully fleshed-out version of Márquez’s Remedios the Beauty. So if you enjoy stories about weird, magical women then this story will most definitely fit the bill.
Overall, The House of the Spirits is pretty amazing. My only critique would lie with how even though power shifts among different players, its brutality is more-or-less written off as a primordial occurrence and never truly challenged as a concept. That said, there is still a great deal of layered nuance interwoven in this tale, and I absolutely recommend it.
Rating: 4.5 stars